


Perihelion

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Series: Shrapnel [6]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Body Horror, Bunkers, Established Relationship, F/M, Mentions of Cancer, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy Scares, Reproductive Issues, Unplanned Pregnancy, but it exists, huge fucking arguments, not like a lot, satellites - Freeform, there's explicit sex in here somewhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-07 01:40:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 28,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11613267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: The risk of getting so close is the risk they’ll burn up entirely.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note: I am throwing everything into the tags because I really really really don’t want to activate anyone’s trigger. Doesn’t mean it’ll be front and center, just be forewarned. This one started as something else and the next thing I knew it had very clearly declared itself as Definitely Not That, so. 
> 
> There are a handful of pregnant!furiosa fics floating around out there. I already did one from [Max’s POV](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11425002/chapters/25756695), but I felt like there was more to explore, and it, uh, severely got away from me. 
> 
> This piece happens after [Glow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11354775) and [Fallout](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11502459).
> 
> Huge thanks to [Tyellas](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas) for the beta. 
> 
> Note: Music for this is “Letters from the Sky” by Civil Twilight

They’re down to less than a liter of fuel when she spots a derelict on the horizon. It could be a trap, but the wind is relentless and stinging, and any tracks disappear as soon as they’re made.

Besides, they have no other options.

They stash the car nearby, hefting the camo nets over it and mounding sand around the tires. The derelict is an old military vehicle, so long in the brutal sun that the olive-green paint is only visible on the lowest parts of the shady southern side. They check it over without speaking, she eyeing the horizon with her scope, he slowly circling the wreck with his radiation detector. Luck is with them, for once: it’s clean, and no one seems to be coming.

The main cabin has been thoroughly looted, but Max somehow knows about a compartment in the back. It’s jammed shut, so he treks back to the car and returns with the crowbar. The frame of the vehicle is twisted, the compartment door caught in the violence. They work at it for half the afternoon, and just as Furiosa is ready to give up, there’s an unbearable metal squeal, and Max painfully wrenches it open.

Inside is a wealth of treasure: suddenly, it’s very obvious this was a fully loaded supply truck that never arrived at its destination. They stare at it, disbelieving, and then he’s tearing at one of the boxes, pulling out two white cans and shoving one at her. “Drink,” he croaks.

She’s so out of it that she doesn’t remember how to pop the lid, and in the end, she just stabs the top with the claw of her prosthesis. The water is warm and stale and faintly metallic, but maybe, just maybe it’s not contaminated.

He retrieves the car and they load up. There’s no guzzoline in the truck’s tank - it’s old enough that anything would have evaporated long ago - but there are, mercifully, miraculously, several hermetically sealed cans in the back of the cargo hold that Max recognizes immediately, letting out a huff of relief.

The fuel isn’t perfect, but it exists and it’s better than the nothing they’re otherwise about to have. They clean the truck out, packing everything they can into the car and then bundling the rest to tie on the roof. There’s everything they need: fuel and food and water, plus a handful of medical supplies. There’s even goods they can trade: uniforms, extra blankets, long-dead batteries that could be salvaged if they can’t be rehabilitated.

The water is the most immediate prize. Their barrels are still half full from the sour spring five days past, and she's set to save them for the radiator until he brings a handful of white tablets from one of the medical kits. “Should work,” he mutters, and counts them out into the barrels. “Now we wait.”

It's almost a celebration, but they're both so exhausted that they can't do anything more than drink some of the canned water. He takes a pair of large gray ration kits, and peers at the tiny writing on its side. Whatever it means, he shrugs to himself without comment, lost in his own inscrutable decision-making. He hands one of the packets to her. “Smells bad, don't eat.”

She opens one of the smaller packets in her kit. It's not obviously rotten but none of it smells _good_ , and it feels like her stomach is caught in her throat.

He sees her hesitation, and frowns. “Maybe...wait?” He’s already tucking in, squeezing some unidentifiable goo into his mouth. Just watching him makes her gut roil, and she hands him her kit without comment. If he gets sick in a few hours, they’ll both know, and he’s obviously fine with that. She contents herself with her can of water.

He’s been driving all day, and he’s the one who almost threw his back out prying open the truck, so by wordless agreement, she takes first watch.

It’s been a long string of days. She doesn’t know what they would have done if they hadn’t found the derelict truck and its supplies, and her missing hand clenches in anxiety. There’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, and the scope and scale of the emptiness is beginning to overwhelm her.

Max has been better since he cast the Glow’s poison from his body, and her phantom pain has subsided to an almost tolerable level. On the other hand, even though he’s got a clamp he can use on the gas, the uneven terrain requires more shifting, and the clutch is hell on his bad knee. She’s still moving under her own power, not grimacing and limping into bed at night like he is, so she shuts her mouth and tells herself she could always feel worse.

Everything is okay right at this moment, but it’s so close to _not_ being okay that finding the derelict doesn’t feel like a victory at all. She hates riding like this, teetering on the edge. They haven’t found any hint of the people who have the satellites; they haven’t found any hint of people anywhere.

She's starting to forget why they're looking for the satellite people at all. Her back hurts from sitting in the car all day, her head hurts from the heat, and more than anything, she feels like shit and she is just _so fucking tired_.

The stars slide around the sky, the satellites mocking her in their silent transit. There are three of them, and she’s been watching for so long she knows exactly when to look. She and Max have both been running on fumes, so she concentrates on trying to burn her headache away with sheer frustration, and lets him sleep. She climbs on the roof of the car, sitting cross-legged so she’ll fall and wake herself up if she starts to doze.

She should be better at this. She and Max set out on a specific quest with the specific goal of finding the people who operate the satellites. Cheedo hopes they’ll have medicine. Toast and Capable hope for radios, for tech from Before that can be adapted to Citadel use. It’s no different than a long run to Bartertown: she’s running lighter, faster, with only Max beside her instead of a full crew, driving his sleek black car instead of a powerful War Rig.  Otherwise, the intent is exactly the same.

She’s a vehicle, and she’s been sent out with an explicit directive. She should be concentrating on the horizon, scouring the Waste for tracks, investigating any wandering trader and makeshift village. She might not have black grease on her forehead or the chains at her waist, but she can’t scrub the Imperator from her bones. As an Imperator, she knew how to find whatever she needed, and she should know how to find things now.

Instead, she's sloppy and propped up by her gun on the roof of the car while Max sleeps, her entire body in revolt. She doesn’t remember the last time she’s had more than a mouthful of food, a swallow of water that didn’t turn her stomach. She can’t keep up with Max; she doesn’t have the stamina or the drive for survival. She’s failing the girls and she’s failing herself, and it burns in her throat.

He usually sleeps in fits and snatches in whatever quiet moments he can, but he’s apparently as exhausted as she is, because he doesn’t woozily stagger out of the bedroll until the sky has started to lighten. He makes an annoyed noise at her, presumably for letting him skip his watch, and she almost punches him. Can’t he be even the least bit grateful?

He gestures to a rations kit, but all she’s interested in is _not being awake_ , and she’s out before she even hits the blanket.

It’s close to noon by the time she crawls back to consciousness, and if she wasn’t buried under the weight of her own fatigue, she’d be furious with him for letting her sleep so long. He’s on the hood of the car, lounging back against the windshield with his bad leg propped up on the scoop, and working his way through another bag of rations. He raises an eyebrow and offers her some of the contents; she shakes her head. Regardless of their age, the rations are clearly not having any ill effect on him, but whatever was in the sour spring is still running through her system like bad brake fluid, and the thought of eating is wholly unbearable. She settles for a little more of the canned water.

He holds out a packet of what might be crackers. Her human hand curls protectively against her stomach, not bothering to answer.

He gives her an inscrutable look. “Could stay here, rest up a bit.”

It sounds _excellent_ , but they’re not so flush on supplies that they can afford to stay in one place. “We should go.”

He shrugs. “South, then?”

She honestly doesn’t care, but it’s the direction they’ve been heading, so that’s where they’ll go.

She doesn’t mean to sleep in the car, but she does. The bouncing feels like hell, but if she sleeps, she doesn’t feel that bad, and even more than that, she’s still exhausted; she passes out and dammit, he lets her. She only wakes up when they slow, Max easing the car under a low outcropping for the night. “Hey,” he says quietly. “You okay?”

She wants to say yes, to tell him to fuck off, but it’s not his fault, and if she’s honest: yeah, she really does feel like shit, but she’s not so incapacitated that she can’t be blisteringly annoyed with herself. Someone should keep watch, but they’re decently hidden, and anyway, they haven’t seen anyone for days. He fusses, bundling her into the bedroll and touching her forehead and cheeks as he checks for fever.

The desert’s been scorching them all day, and she rolls her eyes. He can’t tell a damn thing.  

“Think something was hot?” she asks as he settles in, wrapping himself around her. The memory of him shuddering and burning looms in her mind, and her phantom arm gives a sharp twinge in response.

“Checked,” he reminds her, humming against her hair. “Been a long drive. Too much sun. It’ll pass.”

The next morning, he’s up long before she is, and as soon as she’s awake, he hands her a cup of thin broth. “This’ll help,” he says firmly, and adds, “Staying put today.”

Despite herself, she keeps the soup down, and even manages a few crackers from the ration kits. He looks so expectant and pleased that she nibbles her way through a few more bits; it’s all so sweet, much sweeter than the bleak Wasteland fare she’s used to.

They spend the day sleeping. She hears Max get up a couple times. She thinks he’s organizing their supplies, checking the car, or just puttering. He pokes her periodically, feeding her bits of rations and sips of water before letting her drop back off. By nightfall, she’s feeling something approaching better.

They’re packing up the car when he finally says, “Think we should go east.”

She tilts her head.

“Haven’t found anything.” He frowns. “Getting scarce.”

 _Getting_ scarce? Everything’s been scarce for _days_ , more days than she wants to count. It feels like they could drive south forever and still keep going, and it’ll only ever be endless, endless scrub.

“East,” she agrees. The sun will be in their eyes, but they’ll sleep during the hottest part of the day anyway. Otherwise, the engine will overheat, and they don’t have so much water they can spare it. There’s been nothing south so far, and none of the places in the west had any information about the satellites.

East seems like the next logical direction.


	2. Chapter 2

They drive, and it’s fucking _hot_. The land gets flat and stays flat. Skeletons of trees and shrubs litter the waste, and more than once they come across the bleached and crumbling skeleton of some unidentifiable animal, a camel or kangaroo or something she doesn’t even know, half-buried in the dirt.

They should be saving the cans, but frankly she’s afraid of the water in the tanks, even though whatever tablets he used seem to have worked, and he’s drinking it regularly. The smell is overwhelming, a sharp chemical tang that clings to the back of her throat.

“‘S fine,” he insists, but for whatever reason it still makes her gag.

She’s pissed at him. It’s nothing specific, not even anything he’s done, but he’s the only person she’s seen in over a hundred days, and there’s no one else to be pissed at. She’s already pissed at herself, but it’s not enough. She’s constantly grinding her teeth, itching for a fight that she can’t justify at all.

He seems to feel it. They go for days without talking. She’s painfully bored; she tries to keep watch, but there’s nothing to see, no rocks or trees or anything, just scrub and scrub and scrub. Sometimes, they switch places, and she drives while he sleeps. She feels a little better during those hours, like she has some semblance of control.

He’s worried about her. She can tell, but she can’t say what’s wrong because she doesn’t _know_. It’s nothing identifiable, just the ennui of endless stretch of red dirt and cloudless blue sky.

They hit a dust storm. They wrap the car in canvas, securing it under the tires. The wind howls around them as they huddle inside, curled around each other over the gear shift. It doesn’t matter; the dust still gets everywhere, and there isn’t a damn thing either of them can do about it.

The storm is unbearable, the days after even moreso. They’re both trying to stay hydrated in the heat, but she doesn’t have the stomach for it. That, and it feels like she’s pissing twice as often as he is. She thinks he’s annoyed with her for it - either that, or she’s projecting her own annoyance, which annoys her even more.

She’s still fighting the sourness. Whatever was in the bad water, she hasn’t kicked it, but she’s thoroughly over Max hovering. She doesn’t quite believe him that it wasn’t radioactive, but they’d _checked_. It’s been days and days of this shit, and she can’t tell if or when what she eats is going to run through her like water, or come straight back up. If it gets too bad, she walks far enough away from the car that he can’t hear, and coughs into the dirt, but even _that_ provides little momentary relief. If she thinks about it, she starts to get scared - it could be anything, from anywhere. It could be the one small thing that takes her down, and more than anything, she’s scared of what will happen to Max, so she locks it away in her head and doesn’t think about it. She’s afraid of getting too thirsty, but she also doesn’t want to use more than her share.

She’s a vehicle. She just needs to drain the lines and clear the filters, that’s all, or drive until she burns it out of her pipes.

They see the town appear on the horizon like a mirage, and take the risk of driving right at it. It’s almost a proper village, not as big as Bartertown, but a collection of well-kept houses with a thick ring of salvage around it as defense. It’s dusk, the oppressive heat of the day mellowing into the frigid desert night.

“Feels like I’ve been here before,” Max mutters. “‘Nother life, maybe.”

“Travelers!” A man in a long gray smock waves from the top of the wall as they approach. “Welcome. Welcome!”

The place, they learn, is called Next Exit, so named for the large, decaying sign that hangs from a huge, salt-eaten metal tower in the center of town. “Don’t get many travelers this way,” the man grins. His name is Hale, and he is delighted at their arrival.

Max and Furiosa are exhausted, but they’re led around and introduced to what feels like everyone. “Where’d you come?” Hale asks. “West? South?”

“Nothing’s south,” Max mutters, but Hale just grins.

“Can’t say nothing, just that nobody knows.” He urges them toward a nearby house. “This isn’t anything. Old Ruth died, oh, half a year back. We’re small, we’re not growing, it’s yours if you want to sleep the night.”

In the end, it’s so tempting that despite the killswitch sequence, Max still surreptitiously pulls the spark plugs and flips the various switches he’s hidden in the engine compartment. “The filters get wrecked,” Furiosa tells Hale to distract him, angling their conversation so his back is to Max’s work.

He nods sagely. “Dust to dust, and all that. Dust enough for all of us, out here. Come, get clean.”

Impossibly, there are hot springs. The town’s in a valley of sorts, the barest dip in an otherwise barren landscape, and further inside the ring, the heavy rot of sulfur boils out. She has to swallow hard into her elbow, hating herself, but even Max wrinkles his nose.

“Stinky, yes,” Hale agrees, “but stay awhile, and it’s nothing. Come, see and relax!”

The natural springs have been diverted, the flow running through several channels into a series of man-made pools. “Too hot, otherwise,” Hale says. “Boil the flesh from a man’s bones. But a minute or two - that makes a good lizard.”

They need the bath. Some of the pools are walled off; others are open and public, and their host insists they take a private one, handing them a small lantern to light their way. “You’ll be driven mad by everyone, otherwise,” he explains. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had guests, and we rarely get such excitement. You look like you’ve come a long way. Tomorrow, we can talk - tonight, rest.”

They should be on their guard. They shouldn’t trust him, they shouldn’t trust any of them, but...it’s such an unimaginable luxury that they can’t say no. Not after the distance they’ve been driving.  

“Glow?” Furiosa asks quietly, as they’re undressing.

“Little higher here,” Max says, and her heart leaps into her throat. “Safe, if we don’t stay long.”

“How long?”

“It’s safe,” he repeats, and she’s too tired to argue.

They’ve been travelling far too long with only minimal cleaning, scrubbing themselves down with sand as they’ve needed, and they’re less cautious than they should be. Hale hadn’t asked them to disarm, so even as they undress, their weapons are still reassuringly close. The car has been rendered useless, the pool’s door is closed and bolted. There’s no roof, just high brick walls, and the sky is deep and dark above them. Beyond the wall, two men laugh, and a mother calls to her child. It’s the casual sounds of domesticity, of a place peaceful and unhurried.

It seems completely unnatural.

He checks the door again as she takes off her boots and leathers, folding them nearby. After a moment’s hesitation at the edge, Furiosa lets herself be swallowed up by the water. For the first time in what feels like a hundred days, she’s...calm. The disparate parts of her are slowly melting back together, and she’s starting to feel more like herself, someone confident and powerful and in control. The sulfur smell is less here, almost even tolerable, and if she leans back and closes her eyes, she can even relax.  

The biting night chill is setting in, and the pool is pleasantly warm. In the flickering lamplight, Max strips off his shirt and starts in on his boots. It’s been so desperate, and they’ve been driving with so little comfort that she’s almost forgotten what he looks like, the broad lines of his chest, the sturdiness of his shoulders and thighs.

Suddenly, she’s forgotten how much she needs him.

“Hey,” he murmurs, sinking into the water across from her. “You okay?”

Her feet brush his beneath the surface. “Yes.”

He hums. “Know you’ve been sick.”

She lets her eyes fall closed, swallowing back a surge of defensive anger. “It’ll pass.”

“Medkits have nothing,” he admits quietly. “Looked.”

She hums. It’s the closest she can get to admitting she’d looked too, but she hadn’t recognized half the contents. Instead, she leans her head back against the edge of the pool. “...do you think we’ll find it?”

She doesn’t even know what they’re driving for anymore; maybe she never did.

“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”

“Think we’ll ever go back to the Citadel?”

He looks at her for a long moment, his face very tired and a little sad. “Miss it,” he says, and it’s not a question, and it’s not about him.

She can’t help the sharp dampness in her eyes. “It’s such a long way.”

“Could go back now,” he says. “Leave tomorrow, head west.”

They have to find the people with the satellites, but even if they’re standing on top of them right now, it’s too far for a reasonable trade route. At this point, they’re just exploring, making their way to see if such people even exist. If she and Max manage to find them, they can still barter for the things they’ve been sent to find, medicine and technology, and all these days won’t have been wasted. “We keep moving,” she says.

He hums and holds out his arms, and she moves across the pool. He’s as warm as the water, slippery in a way she doesn’t expect, and when he kisses her, the endless days of driving seem to fall away. He pulls her against him, his mouth opening beneath hers, and all she can think of is that he’s been so close, but she’s _missed_ him, missed the taste of his skin, the shape and weight of him as he swells inside her.  

The water makes them buoyant, the slide of their bodies easy and languid. They move together quietly until the they’re breathing in hitched gasps, his face buried in her shoulder and her fist in her mouth to keep their hosts beyond the wall from hearing. He clings to her at the climax, a spasm of short, frantic thrusts, and she’s right behind him, a hard, painful clench that leaves her shuddering and dizzy.

They relax back into the pool, the small waves of their passion lapping at the edges as the first  satellite slowly moves across the dark.


	3. Chapter 3

The next day, they trade. She’s tired and annoyed with herself, sore breasts and a dull ache below her belly. It’s been a very long time since she last bled, and if it’s going to happen on top of everything else, she just wants it over with. Max tries to be calm, but it freaks him out, the significance of the past and the impossibility of the future, and she doesn’t have the energy to console him.

Despite what Hale claimed, the sulfur does not get less noticeable. Furiosa is haggling with a good-natured, hugely pregnant woman over some of the supply truck’s uniforms when a particularly strong gust blows off the springs. She’s suddenly bent double, breaking out in a cold sweat as she chokes back her breakfast.

“It’s hard,” the woman sympathizes. “When I had my first, the smell was was unbearable, but later on - nothing soothes a sore back like a long, hot soak. It was better with the second, but she made up for it by kicking me half to death.” She rests a fond hand on her belly. “This one’s quiet for now, bless, but if it’s anything like my man, I’ll be running myself ragged before long.”

Furiosa shakes her head, and points to a handful of bolts. “What will you take for those?”

The townsfolk seem genuinely nice, the haggling congenial, brisk and fair, and it’s so incongruous that by afternoon, they’re both itching to get away. Across the ersatz market, a handful of small children have mobbed Max, and she can tell by the set of his shoulders he’d like to get away, but at the same time, he’s not flailing. At one point, two of the kids wrestle a bit over the chance to examine his leg brace, and he gently but firmly restores order.

It’s very much like how he’s handled the more exuberant of the War Pups back at the Citadel, and her heart clenches. They’re so far out with absolutely nothing to show, but they still might find the people with the satellites, the people that they’re looking for. The drive to keep going is the one that says _maybe over the next dune, maybe over the next rise._

It’s the same drive that took her right through the Green Place, not even knowing it was already dead.

As they pack up to leave, she asks Hale about the satellites, but he shakes his head. “Stars that crawl faster than the others? Never noticed those. Are you sure they’re machines?”

Furiosa isn't sure. She isn't sure of anything anymore.

“Other traders have passed through from the east,” he says, adding, “Sometimes they have things from Before, but you do, too, and you came from the west.” He shrugs. “Those that know keep it quiet, and we understand. The best defense is silence.” He glances at Max, then back to Furiosa. “You’re welcome back here any time, but we ask that you not reveal our location. We may not look like it, but we have our defenses. We’ve stood against raiders before, and we’ll stand against them again.”

Max nods. “Not likely back this way.”

“Pity.” Hale shakes both their hands, and they’re off, speeding out into the waste.

 

****

 

It’s not until two days later, when she’s tucked against Max in the bedroll, that Furiosa thinks back to the woman in the village and feels a cold trickle of alarm.

It’s never happened to her, so of course she doesn’t _know_ , not really. There had been so much talk among the women in the Vault, but when she’d gotten out, she’d burned it completely from her mind. Later, when she was a guard instead of a prisoner, she’d closed herself off. She hadn’t let herself hear the conversations, made herself tune out the information that in this moment she suddenly needs.

She doesn’t have the physical context for this. She’d only had second-hand information to begin with, and her mind is abruptly, horribly blank.

Before, despite her failure as a Wife, she’d been otherwise incredibly strong. He’d had her mother shot in the head, and was delighted when she’d shredded two men in her revenge. She doesn’t know why he kept her as long as as he did; she’d walled herself off, retreating into a small, dark corner of her mind. Joe always declared the failures to be due to the women, and when the pills and injections hadn’t worked, he’d thrown her to his Imperators.

It hadn’t happened then, either, and she’d turned herself into a hard knot of scar tissue, something like triumph glowing in her belly where it had been thoroughly proven no child would ever grow.   

But...that was the Citadel. The Green Place was sour; that fact has been established. Maybe the Citadel is a little bit sour, too.

Max isn’t from the Citadel. In the span of his life, he’s only spent a tiny fraction there. He’s from elsewhere. He had a son.

It’s impossible, it’s completely impossible, but now that she’s thinking it, she can’t let it go. Max, from elsewhere. Max, with his son. Maybe that’s how it happened: her broken body and his healthy one, an impossible window of viability and they’d come together, not knowing-

She’s been sick. He hasn’t. She’s thought it was the bad water, but maybe it isn’t. She’s on the precipice of her blood, but maybe she _isn’t_ . It’s never happened, and she’s rested safe in the knowledge it _couldn’t_ , it _can’t_ , but-

She thinks of Toast, of the girls’ fierce and sudden defense of her. She thinks of Mari’s calm resolve, of the way all of them had come forward in a hard, united front. They’d been afraid of Furiosa at that moment, afraid of what she would do. They hadn’t been able to tell how deeply her indoctrination went, how much of her voice was hers and how much was Joe. They hadn’t known if she could identify with the deep terror of having her body hijacked, of being trapped by Joe even after his death.

Furiosa knows perfectly well how it feels to be trapped.  

Her phantom arm clenches, and she curls around it, gasping. She’d thought she’d escaped that time, she’d been _sure_ , but she’d woken up back at the Citadel anyway. He’d laughed. She’d been furious and _shocked_ and half-blind with pain, and he’d been _pleased_. He’d thought she’d cut off her own limb to protect his cargo, and he’d rewarded her with her chains. She’d fought against him at every opportunity, but it all ended up serving his interest anyway.

This isn’t the same. She has no proof, so it’s only a cold, creeping suspicion. This isn’t the moment her hand is trapped by her own wheel, her body blazing with the choice between her arm or the fast-moving flames. Toast had known. The girls all knew. It was obvious to them in a way it’s not obvious to her, and somehow, that’s even _worse_.

She doesn’t have the certainty that made her hack through bone, and even though she doesn’t remember that moment, her body does. Her arm burns and cramps, the shadow of missing tissue a constant reminder. Her body has always known more than she does, and this time, she doesn’t know what it’s _saying_ , but if it’s what she _thinks_ it is-

The noise she makes sends Max rocketing out of a sound sleep. When she can’t stop, he shakes her like she’s stuck in a nightmare, and when that doesn't work either, he curls around her and presses his lips to the back of her neck. Her throat is too tight to speak, and she doesn’t know what she’d tell him anyway.

 

****

 

She’s sick for days. It’s panic, pure unadulterated panic. It starts in her throat and goes through her spine, paralyzing her lungs. She can’t feel any of her limbs, her muscles numb and heavy. It blazes through her body and she is utterly helpless to stop it.  

She knows panic. She’s very familiar with it. She’s used to its shifting patterns, its rise and fall like dunes in the waste. This is something completely different, a terrifying sense of being utterly and completely trapped. It takes her back to the Vault, to when they’d held her down in cuffs and chains, back when her body was a distant, foreign thing and she’d retreated into some dull part of her brain to stave off going mad.

She thinks of the conversation they’d had almost a thousand days ago, of how he’d been on the trigger point of panic himself until the fear couldn’t be held in. She’d been waiting for him to run, waiting for him to rabbit, because that’s what he does when he gets overwhelmed, and she hadn’t understood why he hadn’t until days later.

He’d stayed because he’d wanted to stand by her, to do what he thought was right even if it killed them both in the process. Herself, it’s not something she’d _thought_ about, not with him, not with anyone once she’d gotten out of the Vault. She’d thought he was overreacting, that he was being ridiculous. It wasn’t possible, and that was that. It had never even crossed her mind that at some future time, it _could_ be possible, except now she thinks it’s not only possible for it to happen, it fucking already _has_ , and it’s exploding into her consciousness like a mine she didn’t see coming.

This is going to kill them both, and she can’t think of anything but to deny it as long as possible. Women in the Vault miscarried; they held it in as long as they could, but inevitably, the blood came pouring out and Joe roared his dismay. Maybe she’ll be the same way. Maybe it won’t stick, the way nothing else ever did. Maybe it will slide down her legs, a mix of blood and fluid, and she can start to breathe again. In the thousands of days since her time in the Vault, she’s viewed her blood as an annoyance, a thing that distracts, derails her for a few days, a weakness she’d rather avoid.

She has never hoped to see her blood as much as she does right now.

She has no proof, of course, because it’s never happened. She has no litmus, no Mechanic prodding and poking. She could poke herself, but she has no idea what to look for, what any changes would feel like, and the mere idea of fingers stretching and searching - even if they’re her own - rockets her into a lightheaded haze. She has no idea what to do if it _is_ real, no idea how to induce her blood like Toast did. There are herbs, but her mothers had stressed that like all powerful things, the wrong dose could easily prove fatal, and out here, there’s nothing but dry scrub anyway.

Instead, she sits in the passenger seat, clutching her rifle with her pulse pounding in her ears. When she’s on watch, she waits until he’s asleep and then hides on the opposite side of the car, hiking her shirt up and running her human hand over and over her belly, trying to decide if she feels anything, if she _sees_ anything. Is she swelling or just not quite starving, or maybe she’s exactly the same and and any deviation is a product of her frantic imagination.

In the Vault, the fear had lasted so long she’d just closed herself off. As an Imperator, she’d channeled it into motion, using it like high-octane guzzoline to burn through anyone who stood in her way. When she’d turned the wheel, she’d done the same thing. She’s trying to do that now, but she can’t do a damn thing when the target is inside her own body, and Max is helpless in the face of her rage. It’s not his fault, but it _is_ , it’s his as much as hers, but she’d been utterly certain, and he’d _asked_ , he’d asked so many, many times-

They’d come to a sort of agreement after the second real conversation, after he’d torn himself apart trying to explain something she’d thought she’d made it clear he didn’t need to explain. As far as she’d been concerned, if it happened - which it couldn’t - they might be able to navigate that road together. It would be another one on the endless list of impossible roads they would never have to navigate. She’d considered those words empty, unreal, because she’d been completed confident it would never be an issue.

Suddenly, it’s an issue, and she’s spinning her tires through uncharted sand. She can’t even begin to explore the concept of _maybe_ because all she can think of is his face when they’d talked about it, the way he’d shut himself down for _days_ , and how still, a thousand days later, any mention of his son leaves him locked down and shaking.

Max and the kids back at Next Exit. Max holding court to adoring War Pups. The easy confidence of the pregnant woman selling bolts-

 _No_. She won’t do that to him. She can’t. Not when they might go a hundred more days on this quest, half-starving and desperate themselves.

He knows there’s something wrong. They’ve been closer than skin for far too long, and his survival in the Wasteland has honed his perception to a supernatural level. She can’t talk to him, has to clamp her mouth and throat shut - which isn’t hard, because when she panics, she loses all power of speech, and she’s nothing but panic right now - and he’s getting as frantic as she is. He hates her Imperator face, hates it when she buries the things that she’s feeling, and it’s the only time he actually gets angry. He doesn’t want to be angry, but she’s not letting him in, not telling him what he needs to know, and like her, that horrible energy has to go somewhere.

She doesn’t have any other choice - she _doesn’t_ , not a choice that ends up not tearing the both apart - and he fumes. Not only are they not talking to each other, they’re not even _looking_ at each other, and more than once she thinks she should wait until he’s asleep, and just...walk away.

He’d find her. He always finds her, and for the very first time, she feels trapped both by her body and by him.


	4. Chapter 4

They find it completely by accident. It’s not there, and then suddenly it is, a squat gray building, baked and blistered by the sun, the cracked concrete exterior pockmarked with bullet holes. The fence is tall concertina wire, what used to be surveillance towers collapsed in tall piles of rusty, twisted steel. A handful of small, scraggly trees huddle in the shadow of the building. For a long time, Furiosa and Max watch, certain it’s abandoned but unsure of how to get in.

The building looks old, the compound a dilapidated echo of something once bristling and fierce. It’s exactly how she’s sort of expecting a satellite facility to look. She shouldn’t be expecting anything, because she truly has no idea - she doesn’t even know what a satellite looks like itself, only that it’s a bright spark moving against the darkness - but it’s been a long, hard drive, and she’s had nothing else to distract herself. It would make sense for a satellite to have the same characteristics as the military equipment of Before, dented metal and flaking olive paint. This building looks like that, like the derelict they’d looted.

She’d never asked her mothers what a satellite looked like. She’d been flush with youth, bored with the musings of things long past, and eager only to discover new ground with Val. She’s always looked ahead. She can’t look back; there’s only been mistakes and bloodshed. In the shadow of the car, when Max can’t see the movement, she presses her human hand against her belly, and wonders if this will be the same. There are different kinds of redemption-

She doesn’t want this. (Does she?)

She can’t even begin to entertain that line of thinking. It will get them both killed. His face-

There isn’t any movement from the building, but it’s late enough in the day that investigating doesn’t seem like a good idea. “First watch,” Max mutters, and settles back into driver’s seat with the rifle on his lap.

She suddenly, painfully, wants to be curled around him, and he must see it, because he gives her a long, inscrutable look, and then bumps the gearshift as far forward as it will go. “C’mere.”

The car isn’t big enough for both of them this way, but if she mounds a blanket over the gearshift and hangs her feet out the passenger door, she can use his lap as a pillow in a way that is very nearly comfortable. He drops a hand onto her head, his fingers tracing small circles in her hair.

“Could tell me,” he says quietly.

She really, really can’t.

Somewhere in the very dark hours of the morning, she feels him shift, and she crawls back to consciousness to take over the watch. “Nothing,” he mutters, and then settles back in the driver’s seat.

Her back hurts and she has to piss, so she gets out. When she’s done, she wraps herself in a blanket and crawls up onto the roof of the car.

The building looks abandoned, but they’re both very well aware that what exists on the surface may not reflect the complex beneath, and places like that are where tribes like the Buzzards thrive. There aren’t any tracks in or out, but that doesn’t mean there’s not another entrance somewhere else, and before they investigate, they have to be sure. The strongest likelihood is that this place is empty and looted, and they’ll find nothing useful.

It’s comes from a dark, selfish place, but she almost hopes this will be another dead end. They’ll have to drive out back into the Waste, and they don’t have the supplies for that. They won’t get anywhere. They’ll drive and drive, and this thing between them will destroy them both, and the collateral damage will be minimal.

She’s running out of time. Her brain is consumed, every muscle and bone concentrating on an exit strategy. She’s lived her life plotting from one moment to the next, but for this, she’s backed into a corner. They’ve been driving for so long and in so many different directions that without looking at the map, she doesn’t know how long it would take them to get back to the Citadel. They’ve been out over a hundred and fifty days, and even if it takes them less than that, she is absolutely sure it’s long enough for him to notice.

It’s been thousands of days since she’s felt this out of control. When she puts on her arm, she’s strapped her girdle extra-tight out of lightheaded paranoia. She thinks of Angharad, of the twisted length of wire and her bloody thighs, and she suddenly _understands_. Herself, she’d been more afraid of Joe’s murderous wrath, but even that pales in comparison to this. She doesn’t know how to try what Angharad had tried, but with every passing day, that night looms large in her mind.

She thinks of Max’s face, of his _face-_  

It’s almost dawn when a searchlight abruptly flicks on, a blinding shock that startles them both into a hard scramble for weaponry and cover. Max’s eyes are wide with searching alarm, but she doesn’t have any explanation either.

A voice comes over a loudspeaker, crackling and tinny: “We see you. What do you want?”

Behind the car, they stare at each other, unsure. Finally, Furiosa cups her hands over her mouth. “Trade. Looking for information.”

This might not be the people with the satellites, but maybe they know where to find them. They’ve been looking for so long, and to stumble across this facility-

The facility is quiet for such a long time, she’s beginning to think they’re not going to answer. Eventually, the loudspeaker crackles again. “Why are you here?”

“Looking for the satellites,” Furiosa announces.

There’s a long pause, and then the loudspeaker finally says, “...say again?”

It’s not the response they’re expecting.

“Satellites,” she tries again.

There’s what sounds like a brief scuffle on the other end of the loudspeaker. “Why?” a different voice asks.

“Trade,” she calls back.

Another long pause. “...do you have one?”

She looks at Max, and he’s as stymied as she is. “We’re looking for the people that have them.”

This time, the silence is so complete that she’s about to pack up her rifle, when the loudspeaker emits a squeal that abruptly turns into a voice.

“Fuck it,” says the loudspeaker. Then: “Proceed slowly. We have guns on you.”

They get back in the car, edging toward the huge wire gate at the front of the compound. She’s expecting it to open, but it doesn’t.

“Shit,” says the loudspeaker. “Just...push it. It’s unlocked.”

Furiosa leans across the gearshift. “I don’t see any guns,” she whispers. “Do you?” The sun’s barely up, but she’s usually able to catch the glint of a scope, the matte emptiness of a sniper in his perch. There aren’t any holes in the building that would allow for concealed weaponry, nothing mounted on the roof, nothing in the collapsed surveillance towers. She can see only the searchlight, and another rusted lump that might be the loudspeaker.  

Max looks as edgy and confused as she is. “Nothing,” he mutters. “Doesn’t mean there aren’t.”

She knows what kind of luck she has. He’s driving with one hand on the wheel, the other on the shotgun hidden just under the dashboard. They’re too close for her rifle, but she’s got a pistol in her human hand and a bolt-launcher nearby. “Are you ready to gun this thing?”

He huffs. As if she needed to ask.

“For god’s sake,” the first voice says. “You want in? Open the damn gate.”

This is so far from what she’s expecting that neither of them know how to react. “I’ll get out,” she says. “Get ready to drive.”

He nods, and double-checks his shotgun.

The gate is largely rusted in place. Once, it ran on a track, but of the six wheels, three are missing and the others won’t turn. She kicks the gate in a few strategic points, and then manages to push it just enough for the car to get through. It’s a tight fit, but she’s already seeing stars from the effort, and the fence has collapsed enough that the gate simply won’t move any further.

She nods to Max, who rolls his shoulders uneasily and slowly creeps forward. She’s got her pistol ready, scanning for any oncoming threat, and he parks with enough room to make a fast emergency exit in reverse.

She doesn’t _see_ any guns, but this place is clearly from Before, so she doesn’t believe that they’re not armed.

There’s a short, narrow door, the rivets stained with rust. A chipped yellow sign announces Authorized Personnel Only. It seems the only logical entrance. Max positions himself on one side, and after a moment, Furiosa pounds on it with her prosthetic hand.

There’s a series of hard clicks, and then the door swings open.

Three men meet them. They’re dressed in similar clothes, their trousers green and spotted with tan and brown, their shirts a white laundered to a thin, fragile gray. All the fabric is heavily worn and carefully repaired, patched at the knees and thighs with an even more faded blue. The first man is old and grizzled, walking with a pronounced hunch and carrying what is obviously a radiation detector. She thinks he might be even older than the Keeper.

The other two are younger, but not by much, perhaps Amy’s age; they brandish assault rifles, weapons that are impossibly rare and in very good condition. She suddenly wonders if she and Max have gotten in over their heads.  

Everyone is still as the oldest one waves the wand of the detector at them, as far out of reach as he can possibly get. When it does little more than the quiet crackle she’s used to, he frowns at it, and then squints at them both. “Why are you here?”  

“Looking for the people who run the satellites,” Furiosa says. Her arms are raised near her ears, and his watery eyes flick to her metal claw; good - they should see that she’s capable of her own defense.

“Why?” demands the taller of the two with the assault rifles. “What do you want with them?”

“Trade,” Max says, and licks his lips nervously. “Medical supplies, maybe a radio.”

“A radio,” the other says in wonder. “What’s a desert savage like you want with a radio?”

The taller one snorts. “How does he even _know_ about radio, is the question.”

She can see the muscles clench in Max’s jaw. “We can offer water and fuel,” she tells them.

“Fuel?” The oldest looks surprised.

“Guzzoline,” she confirms.

The younger ones glance to their leader, and one shrugs.

The old one frowns. “What do you mean, guzzoline? It’s no good to us scavenged.”

“Fresh,” she says. “Plus other distillates.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you have a refinery.”

One of the younger ones shakes his head. “It’s going to be full of impurities. These things are cobbled together; no engineers, no real crew. It’s not possible.”

“‘S clear,” Max breaks in. “Good. Clean.”

“And how would you know?”

There’s a long beat, and then he offers, “I was a cop, once.” His voice is hoarse, rough.

“A cop. Cops are all dead. Nice try, mate.”

He swallows hard, and she can see him dredge the word up from somewhere deep and buried. “MFP.”

“MFP.” The leader blinks. “Really.”

Furiosa feels her stomach drop. It means something, something huge that he’s never talked about, and he’s offering it as leverage, as credentials.

“No shit,” the shorter one says. “I’d have guessed you were way too young for that.”

“MFP.” The taller one frowns. “Must have missed that one.”

“Highway Patrol,” the shorter one says. “Disbanded, but looks like they held on in the outer areas.” To Max, he asks, “Where were you stationed?”

Max’s eyelids flicker, and he shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. Gone anyway.”

This is the most she will ever know about that time in his life. She can tell in his face, the way his shoulder roll a little as he says it. He won’t mention it again, not even to her, and will be better for them both if she never asks; it’s like the details of her time in the Vault, a memory they both understand is best left unshared.

“‘Doesn’t matter’. Real helpful, mate.” The taller one shifts and gestures to Furiosa. “You were a cop, fine. She a cop then, too? That’s a hell of an arm.”

“She makes her own way.”

That shouldn’t sting as much as it does.

The shorter one breaks in. “There’s nothing here for you. Either of you.”

The leader looks at her, looks at his subordinate. “Information, maybe. We can’t afford to turn that down.” He considers, turning to Max. “How did you find us?”

“Didn’t,” Max says. “Just - drove.”

“You just drove, and you drove right here.”

“We’ve been out almost a hundred and fifty days,” Furiosa interjects. “No one’s known about you. We’ve asked.”

“You can’t possibly be considering this,” the taller one says. “There’s nothing they can offer us.”

“I’m curious,” the leader says. “A refinery, if it’s any good, might be of use. Come on in, then.” He gestures to a nook just inside the door. “Your weapons. Leave them here.”

Max looks at him, expressionless.

“Do it,” he insists, “or there will be no talking at all.”

“We’ll leave the weapons,” Furiosa says, “but we’ll take our bullets.”

The three don’t seem to know how to react to that. “Fine,” the leader finally says. “Knives stay here as well.”

It’s not an ideal agreement, but it’s the best they’re going to get.

They start disarming. She pops the bullets from the pistol and stashes them in a pocket. Out come both boot knives and the knife at her hip; it’s the most she’s got, for the moment, and she’s been relying on her rifle more than she should these days anyway. Max, on the other hand, is carrying an entire arsenal. His shotgun is the most obvious, and he puts the shells in one of the pouches in his tactical vest. Then there’s three knives from the vest, the one in the sheath on his thigh, and a little derringer that's usually stashed in the glove box. Two more knives from somewhere under the vest, another from somewhere in his jacket, and a pistol from the holster at the small of his back.

Their hosts are getting increasingly alarmed.

Max pauses a moment, running through his mental catalog, and then pulls a pistol from somewhere else; she doesn’t entirely know _where_ it comes from, but she’s pretty sure if they’d fucked in the last twenty-four hours, she’d have found it. Then, a final knife, which she _definitely_ would have found.

Mothers, he’s the best thing she’s ever seen. He makes her mouth water for his skin, a hot rush of blood revving up in her veins.

She is going to lose him completely, and it will absolutely kill her.

“And the arm,” the tall one says, his mouth twisting maliciously. “Looks like a great big weapon to me.”

“Fucking hell, Jack,” says the younger one, but he sighs and gestures with his gun. “It goes. I’m sorry.”

Fuck, she’s going to be completely naked. Gritting her teeth, she tugs at the straps and adds her prosthesis to the pile.

“...well,” the leader finally says. “I suppose you have names?”

“Furiosa,” she grinds out.

The tall one laughs. “Wait, seriously?”

She feels a bright flush of anger. “It’s the name my mother gave me.”

“Fine, yeah. And you?”

“Max,” Max says, after a moment’s hesitation, and she remembers how he’d kept his name a secret until his blood was flooding her veins. Even then, she hadn’t even heard it.

Behind them, the door closes with a hard clang. The leader points to himself, and then to the other two. “Oliver. Kai, Jack. You’re here to talk about satellites?”

“Only if you have info,” Furiosa says.

“You’re not in a position to make demands,” Jack says, hefting his assault rifle.

“You want our information,” she says flatly. “We want yours.”

All three of them look too nervous, and the one called Kai keeps glancing at the radiation detector like he can’t quite believe it’s not screaming. “We’ll talk,” Oliver finally says. “Kai, get Jane up here. Jack, will you escort our guests to the conference room?”

The taller one narrows his eyes. “Only if you’re sure.”

Her body is lopsided without her arm, the familiar, grounding weight absent and unnatural, but Furiosa had no choice but to let them direct her and Max further into the facility. It reminders her of Corpus’s bunker at the Bullet Farm, a sharply turning concrete tunnel with dim, flickering lights. This one is much better kept, no stagnant water on the floor, no pervasive reek of malevolent metal, but there’s an unsettling air about it.

She’s not sure she could handle the smell of the Bullet Farm. She’s swallowing back enough of her meager dinner as it is, letting the fear and discomfort go straight into the steel of her spine. She’s still enough of an Imperator that she’s a threat to these men even without any of her defenses, and by her mothers, she will let them know.

In addition to their guns, Jack and Kai wear pistols, and she’d counted three knives between them. They’re walking behind her and Max, but if needed, she could grab one of the knives and have at least one of the others disarmed before they’ve had a chance to shoot.

At least, she thinks she could. It’s been so long since she’s had a good, decent fight, so long being immobile in the car that she realizes with a start that she might actually be unprepared. Calisthenics while she’s on watch are a poor substitute for real combat, and she hasn’t felt well enough even for that. Even more, they don’t know her reputation. They’d _laughed_ at her name, when no one within a thousand klicks of the Citadel would ever dare.

She wants to grab their guns and teach them. She wants them to _fear_ , to feel their blood on her hands. She will take a hundred days of frustration and anger into violence, she will take every drop of panic in her body and turn it into a blistering, immutable rage, and she will make them _learn_.


	5. Chapter 5

They’re taken to a windowless room deep underground. It’s almost an exact cube, with a long, smudged table in the middle. There’s a long strip of light on the ceiling, tiny pinprick bulbs half-dead or black. Everything in this building screams of Before, decayed but somehow too perfect, almost like the Vault but without the glass, without the green. It’s dark, dank. There are thick webs of dust in all the corners, deep cracks in the concrete, and a vague, pervasive odor of stale air and human waste. She swallows hard. She’s not sure what she expected; maybe something more like Joe, thousands days of dust and age rotting from the sun on the outside, rotting with disease from within, a festering sore open and rank. Everything he’d had from Before was heavily patched and piecemeal from whatever he could find. This place feels old, it smells old, but at the same time - the patches are skillfully done, the materials uniform. It all unreal.  

She glances at Max, but he’s staring straight ahead, lost somewhere in his brain. Was this the sort of place he’d left behind? She wants to get closer, to brush herself against him, to let him know she’s here, but they’ve been so distant for so long she’s afraid it’s not going to work.

They’re in danger, but they’re so fractured, and she’s the one that’s broken them, and he can’t even _know_ -

The three men sit, and a joined by a fourth, a woman perhaps Mari’s age with short-cropped white hair. “Jane,” she says by way of introduction. “Welcome.” She’s trying to hide a nervous grin and mostly failing; the way everyone is tense and twitchy, a strange mix of overjoyed and overwhelmed, it’s abundantly clear they haven’t had visitors in a very, very long time.

Furiosa wonders why they even let them in, if it was more than Max’s credentials and the mention of the satellites. This whole place feels wrong, but she can’t quite vocalize how, just like she knows what she suspects about herself but doesn’t have any way to confirm.

When they’re seated and introductions are done, Oliver leans forward and steeples hands that aren’t quite shaking. “Tell me about the refinery.”

“It’s from Before,” Furiosa says. “It was taken fourteen thousand days ago.”

Kai blinks. “Fourteen thou...what the hell.”

“That’s all they’ve got out there,” Jack smirks. “Days. It’s the only way to count a short, miserable life.”

“Forty years,” Max says through clenched teeth. “D’you want the info or not.”

“Forty years,” Oliver says. “Fine. That’s a very long time.”

“Basically forever, like us.” Kai sucks his teeth. “Live here, die here.”

“You can always leave,” Jane interjects. “There’s nothing keeping you.”

“And risk it out there? Rads through the roof, world all dead?”

“Rads on these ones were almost baseline.”

Jack glowers. “Detector’s broken then. Can practically smell the fallout on them-”

“The refinery,” Oliver repeats.

“Three large towers,” Furiosa says. “Fifty-three deep wells. Close to ten thousand people. They make guzzoline, but many other things. Bitumen. Heavy fuel. Lamp gas.”

That stops them all. Jane whistles. “That’s...that’s a refinery.”

“Stable control, now,” Max says. “Could talk, if there’s trade.”

“How do we not know about this?” Kai looks at Oliver. “Refinery that size, it’s bound to show up.”

“Maybe they thought it was brushfire,” Jane says.

“They’d tell us if it was important,” Kai says doubtfully.

“A _brushfire_? Are you fucking kidding me?” Jack rolls his eyes. “In what brush? They’ve got the entire sky, and they can’t see a fucking refinery that’s been there for forty fucking years.”

The way he says it is accusatory, resentful, and it hits her in a rush. “You’re not the satellite people,” Furiosa breathes, and a hard spike of anger flashes up her spine. “You bring us in and talk about trade-”

“How do you even know about the satellites?” Kai demands.

“They don’t know,” Jack says. “They haven’t got shit. Someone told them, and they’re here thinking they’ve got something-”

“Shows,” Furiosa says. “Everyone had a show.”

There’s a long pause, and then Jane chuckles. It’s not mocking; it’s almost gentle. “Shows,” she says. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“Are you serious?” Jack says. “ _Shows_? Do we look like we have shows?”

Her mothers had talked about shows in idle moments. “Stories,” Mary Jobassa had said, “acted out, and everyone could see them.” It hadn't made any sense, but Furiosa had trusted that things Before were more complicated, that technology approaching magical had made sense to the people that used it.

She doesn't have any idea what it would take to make a show.

“If you’re not the satellite people, where can we find them?” she demands.

“The fuck you want with them, anyway,” Jack says. “They have nothing you want.”

“Medicine,” she retorts. “Someone was in Bartertown, selling it.”

“ _Bartertown_??” He throws back his head and laughs at that one, and she wants to wring the laughter from his throat. “Let me guess: it’s west of Hovel City and north of Shitsvile.”

“Jack,” Jane interjects. “Enough.”

“This is stupid. These people can’t offer us anything because they have nothing.” He shakes his head. “A refinery? That’s a lie. They read it somewhere, if they can even read at all.”

Max is halfway out of his chair before Kai and Jack both have their pistols raised. “Believe us,” he growls, “or not.” He glances at Furiosa. “We should leave.”

This place - it’s a bunker. It’s a relic. The people here are exactly like the Vuvalini who never left the Green Place, the last of a dying tribe. The four of them have no Citadel to claim, no adopted daughters to ensure their future. She sees it, and Max sees it. “Where are the people with the satellites?” she asks quietly. “You don’t even know, do you.”

She thinks of Corpus, of his careful notes and piles of books. She thinks of Miss Giddy, with scraps of knowledge from Before tattooed into her skin. They’d known things. They’d understood things. They’d been stringent in cataloguing and preserving. The people sitting in front of her, the four of them, might have been like that once, but they aren’t anymore. There’s an air of hysteria about them, like Wretched gone mad with thirst.

“If we did know, we wouldn’t tell you,” Kai says. “You’ll take that information back into the desert, back to your shitty little raiding parties, and destroy it like you’ve destroyed everything else.”

She sees Jane look down at her hands, and remembers Angharad’s question: _who killed the world?_ They know the truth, but they aren’t willing to face it any more than they’re willing to face the brutal sun.

The answer is right here in this room, and she knows Jane knows it: it’s age and fear and the persistent refusal to change. The raiding parties didn’t destroy the Waste; men like Kai did.

“We can’t let them go,” Jack says. “They know where we are, and they’ll bring every savage within a hundred klicks down on our heads.”

“And what do you propose we do?” Jane suddenly demands.

“Kill them,” Jack says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and then both Furiosa and Max are on their feet. They are fractured, but they still move at the same time with the same power.

Except she’s gotten up too fucking fast, and the world hazes into stars.

“What the-” Jack starts, and then she’s down, her forehead on the table as all the blood in her body pounds in her ears. Distantly, she’s aware of one of Max’s hands resting protectively on the back of her neck, the hard rush of his breath as he’s primed to defend her.

Fuck. _Fuck_. She’s so angry, and so _useless_ , and he’s right there and she can’t even tell him _why,_  but he’s still solid and unquestioning and _reliable_.

She doesn’t deserve him, she-

“She’s hot,” Jack’s yelling. “They’re both hot-”

“You tested them-”

“It’s not on their skin, it’s in their _bones-”_

“Put that damn gun away,” Jane snaps. “For god’s sake, Jack.”

“It’s poison, it’s a plague!” He’s on the trigger edge of completely losing it. “Twenty years we’ve been here, and you fucking brought them _right_ in-”

They think she’s a vessel, and she _is,_ just not for what they think-

“Took our weapons,” Max growls. “No trouble. We just go.”

“You still know where we are-”

“We’d see them coming,” Kai points out. “We’d close up like we do every other time.”

Jack throws up his hands. “And how are we going to defend ourselves? You and what ammo?”

They all realize what he’s said at the same exact moment.

To his credit, Max does not immediately launch over the table, and mercifully, neither does anyone else. Furiosa forces herself upright. “Trade for that,” she says.

Everything stops. “Trade for what?” Kai asks carefully.

“Ammunition.” She has their attention, and she slowly sits back up, swallowing back the buzzing in her head to slide into the familiar patterns of her Imperator self. “Any caliber you need.”

“That's a fucking _lie_ -”

“Here,” she snaps, pulling a handful from her pocket and scattering them across the table. “Check our bullets.”

They all stare. “No way I’m touching those,” Kai says. “They’re hot. They have to be. She’s got some Outback disease-”

“Do it,” Oliver says coldly.

“ _You_ do it,” Jack says, his voice rough with panic. “If you’re so sure-”

Kai shakes his head. “No way to test them. I’m not leaving if they’re sitting here.”

“We don’t all have to go,” Jane says. “Take a few, go test them down below, and come back.”

“And leave you here? With Oliver? And these two? You don’t even know-”

Jane rears up like a poked goanna. “There you fucking go,” she bristles. “As if anyone could kill either of them right now, as if any of us could take them. Twenty years, Kai. Twenty years you’ve had your foot on my neck-”

“Now is _not_ the time-”

“Go,” Oliver says, his tone unimpeachable.

“Might have been the half colonel once,” Jack mutters, “but that shit’s long past.”

She knows that word, knows it in her bones. “Colonel,” Furiosa breathes. “Colonel Joe Moore.”

The name of the man, before he became Immortan.

Everything stops. “Joe?” Oliver says, his voice cracking in disbelief. “Joe _Moore_?”

“Bullets are legit,” Max growls. “Fuel is legit.”

“Who the fuck is that?” Jack demands. “Are we supposed to know?”

“The Water Wars,” Jane murmurs. “He was in the Water Wars.”

Kai’s hands go to his naked scalp in alarm. “I heard he went crazy.”

“He was a hero, once,” Oliver says quietly. He narrows his eyes. “How do you know him?”

It’s impossible to explain. There aren’t enough words to tell them about everything, to even begin to unfold all that’s happened. She doesn’t know how much they know of him, or what he was Before. She doesn’t know herself, only what she’s been told, and of that, she doesn’t know which is truth and which is bluster. She can’t tell them about the Citadel. She can’t tell them about the Vault without her own truth spilling out of her mouth, and Max is right there, Max is _right there_ \- “He owned us,” she finally says, and then, with no small amount of triumph: “Now he’s dead.”

Kai blinks. “ _Owned_ you?”

Furiosa stares him down. “That’s Joe’s brand on the back of my neck. On the back of _his._ ”

“She killed him,” Max says, his hand heavy with significance on the back of her neck, and there - they’re back in sync, two pistons in the same engine. She can feel the energy flowing between them. If they have to fight, they will be in perfect concert, a union born of violence and perfected by two thousand days breathing each other’s breath.  

“Brand,” Jane says, horrified.

“I don’t believe you,” Jack says. “I don’t.”

Putting her back to them goes against everything’s she’s ever learned, but Max is watching them with hard, sharp eyes. She twists in her chair enough for them to see, and then turns back around. “He called himself Immortan, the one who caught the sun. Be glad you didn’t know him as well as we did.” She leans forward, putting the emphasis on her stump and smiling slightly as their eyes are drawn to the damage, the unsaid implications of such a trauma. “I killed him and everyone who stood with him.”

That's a palpable threat to any potential accomplice in this room.

Jane looks like she’s going to be sick. The others wear varying expressions of revulsion and unease.

Oliver finally clears his throat. “This ammunition. Where’s it from?”

“It’s made,” she says. “They call it the Bullet Farm.” _Anti-seed. Plant it and watch something die._ “We control it.”

Kai’s looking at her like he’s suddenly afraid, and he _should_ be. “You’re not a scavenger,” he says, eyes wide.

“I was his Imperator,” she says, and she is his Imperator again for this moment, for this negotiation. She feels Max’s frisson of anxiety beside her, and the barest hint of something else, something hot and slick and wanting. He’s not a scavenger either, and that’s what binds them; a scavenger does the bare minimum to survive, and between them, they’ve done so much more. Together, they're unstoppable.

She is going to shatter everything they are, and she has to do it soon.

“Imperator...” Kai swallows. He may not recognize the title, but he can guess the station, and she watches with no small amount of pleasure as he realizes exactly what kind of traitor she is.

“Why should we deal with you?” Jack demands. “Imperator - that means nothing.”

“It means everything,” she snaps, and even if she’s not wearing her grease on her forehead or her chains at her waist, such things still exist under her skin; most importantly, the accessories she’s worn were only incidental to her rise to power, and the people in this room are finally starting to recognize that.

Jack steps back without meaning to, his jaw working with unease.

“We came to find the people with the satellites,” Furiosa says. “Either you can help us, or you don’t.”

She lets that sentence hang in the air.

“You’ve got nothing,” Jack suddenly says. “You’re weak. You - something’s wrong with you. You’re hot or you’re sick. You’re lying. You wouldn’t have come all this way-”

“We would.” Max’s hand is still on the back of her neck, a fierce, firm weight, and her lips twist in approval.

“There aren’t any satellites here,” Jane says quietly. “They won’t tell you that, but I will.”

“Jane-” Kai bursts out, just as Jack howls, “What the fuck, Jane-”

Oliver is silent, unreadable.

Max frowns. “Where?”

“Pine Gap,” she says. “But our equipment failed three years ago, and it’s too far for us to drive. If you go…tell them our radio’s out. Maybe they'll send a new one.”

“You’d give us away!” Jack throws his hands in the air. “Like that. Just like that. How hard did we scrape to find this place, Jane? How hard did we scramble? We barely made it here in the first place - how many of us even _made_ it - and we’ve held it for twenty fucking _years_ -”

“We’re dying,” she snaps. “We’ve got nothing. How much ammunition do we have, Jack? Go on, tell me. How are the filters? How is the food? What’s our water supply? Tell me about the reactor. How’s it holding up these days?”

“Fuck you,” Jack says. “Just- fuck you.”

Oliver cocks his head, expressionless. “How far did you come?”

“Thirty days,” Max says. “If you make a straight run.”

That’s a sharp stab of hope - if she can make it thirty days, if they can get back to the Citadel by then...maybe she won’t even show by then-

Kai’s already shaking his head. “We’ve got nothing that would make it that far. Batteries are long gone.”

“We can make that run,” Furiosa says. She thinks the current rig could manage to carry twenty days of fuel, but they’d have to plan for the return trip-

It would take a lot of engineering, a lot of modification and planning, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

“Lots of hostile territory between there and here,” Max says.

“Thirty _days?_ ” Jack says. “What the hell are you _driving?_ ”

Max doesn’t even blink. “Carefully.”

“We could have gone four days, once,” says Jane. “But that was ten years ago, and we don’t have anything that would run gas.”

This isn’t going to work. Not the way things are right now. There’s the issue of there being sufficient guzzoline between here and the Citadel to fill the rig, and added fuel from Gastown would require an upgrade to the current rig’s chassis and tanks and defensive capabilities. It could be done, but they’re already shaking their heads. They’re giving up before they’ve even considered it.

“You should go,” Kai says bitterly. “Clearly we can’t help you, and you can’t help us.”

“Pine Gap is almost fifteen hundred klicks north,” Jane says. “In...do they still call it Alice Springs?”

North. All this time they’ve been travelling south, and the satellites are _north_ -

Max shakes his head. “Don’t know the name.”

“You’ve gone insane,” Jack says. “You give us away, then you give _them_ away-”

“They could be dead too,” Oliver breaks in, and everyone falls silent. Almost sadly, he says, “Are there even still satellites up there? I haven’t been far outside in so long...”

“It’s _hot_ ,” Kai interjects, “it’s been hot for years-”

“S’okay,” Max says. “Sometimes not. But mostly.”

“That’s _you_ , you mutant desert rat-”

Jane leans forward in her chair. “That’s a poor excuse, Kai. It’s a piss-poor excuse now, and it’s been a piss-poor excuse for years.” She looks back to Furiosa. “Even if the satellites are still up, that doesn’t mean they’re working, or that anyone is talking to them.”

“Someone came to Bartertown,” Furiosa says. “They had medicine from Before, but made new.”

“It isn’t hard to synthesize something like aspirin, with the right material.” She frowns. “Do you know what they were selling?”

 _Fertility enhancements_. She can’t say that, can’t say it past the hard lump in her throat. “I’m not a medic.”

Jane shakes her head. “Maybe someone found a lab somewhere, but the satellites aren’t going to be connected. They’re nothing alike at all.”

The sentence comes crashing down around her ears. This: this is what she’s been afraid of, what she’s been afraid to admit to herself. They’ve driven over a hundred days, and they’ve been looking for the wrong thing. She's been hanging her hope on useless information. Max’s hand on the back of her neck spasms briefly, and she feels his disappointment as keenly as her own.

“Do you have any idea where a lab could be?” she makes herself ask.

Jane shrugs helplessly. “Adelaide. Perth. Somewhere large.”

“All hot,” Max says. “All buried.”

Furiosa doesn’t even recognize the names, but she recognizes the bleak finality in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” Jane says. “I wish we could tell you more.”

“No, you don’t,” Jack interjects, but Oliver silences him with a look.

“It’s too far,” the old man says. “Too far for us, and too far for you. We’d talk about trade, but it appears it’s not realistic for either of us.”

Furiosa will not let herself slump. She will keep her shoulders back and her head high and proud. “We’ve exchanged information,” she says. “I consider that an even trade.”

“Useless information,” Jack mutters. “Refinery too far, ammunition too far. No way to prove it’s real. No way to prove they haven’t just infected us all with some mutated virus-”

“Your pistol,” she says, and gestures to the bullets on the table. “Those will fit. Let us leave, and you can keep them.”

He shakes his head. “Pistol is nothing against raiders,” he says bitterly. “Only thing it’s good for is blowing our brains out, and you damn well know that.”

She doesn’t break eye contact.  “At least you’ll be doing it yourself.”

 

****

 

Somehow, they’re allowed to leave. They collect their weapons, and she holds out the promised bullets. Jack takes them, not meeting her eyes.

They’re barely out the door when the raiders attack.

“Shit!” Kai yells. There had been no tracks, no hint of any threat, but here they are, appearing from nothing like a mirage as they often do. It’s a small party but strong enough to cause problems.

 _You and what ammo._ Kai shuts the door with a desperate slam. She can’t blame him.

Furiosa and Max look at each other at the same time, and then she's wrenching on her arm as he shoves cartridges into her rifle. “Got twelve,” he mutters, and then the rifle is in her hands, his fingers swiftly buckling the last of her straps. It's not the last of their ammo, but it'll be close. There's more, but it's tucked away in their supplies - stupid, stupid. They’ve gotten complacent.

He cracks his shotgun. “How many?”

She's already on the roof of the car, sighting them. “Five vehicles. Two with mounted guns.” They're barely in range, but she takes the shot.

The leader’s left front tire explodes, and the car flips.

He hums in approval. “We go?”

“No.” She sights down the next one. “They're coming right for us.”

“Scavs?”

“All of them.”

He squints at the oncoming cars, and ducks as a shot whizzes overhead. “Might get pinned down.”

Another shot, and a second car shudders to a halt, its radiator going up in a wild burst. Her lips quirk in a feral grin. “Not _yet_.”

After the lead car, hitting the tires isn't enough. She concentrates on the drivers, and then Max is dragging her down behind the car as a hail of bullets strafe the place she'd been just seconds before. The raiders are almost too far for his shotgun, but he's trying anyway, giving her covering fire.

For one brief, lightheaded second, she thinks that she could get shot, and her nightmare would be over. She wouldn’t have to die, she’d just need to catch a stray bullet in the right place-

She slams back to reality, hard. She’s seen people get gutshot. She knows what it does. She’d die, if not immediately then messily and in agonizing pain, and Max would bleed himself dry trying to save her.

Panic spikes again, and she channels it into her rifle, into her scope, the thrilling snap as the shot leaves the barrel.

They're not well-prepared, these scavs. They're desperate more than anything else, the kind of kamikrazy that tells her they don’t have a base and haven’t for far too long. She slides back into being the Bag of Nails, the daughter of Mary Jobassa, the initiate of Katie Concannon. These poorly-trained scavs are barely a challenge. For the first time in what feels like a hundred days, she has an outlet for her aggression, and she takes it, letting the rifle be her arms and the bullets be her fists. Skulls explode in blood, each one a glorious pinpoint of thick, gruesome beauty.

In the end, she doesn’t even feel it. The last of the raiders slumps onto his wheel, the car hitting the concertina fence with a hard metal groan. It’s close, almost too close for comfort, but she does it, her blood singing in her veins. She’s breathing hard and pleased with herself: it was a good shot, all of them good shots, and she didn’t waste a single bullet.

And then Max is looking at her like he’d looked at her from the People Eater’s mobile refinery, wild eyes and blank, terrified face. It’s only then that her human arm starts to hurt, and he’s pouncing on her, pushing her down with his hands hard on her shoulder.

“ _No_ ,” he’s saying. “No no no no-”

The only thing she can think is _at least he’s not going to find out_.


	6. Chapter 6

When she wakes up, she’s in a room that’s dim and far too familiar, and she can’t feel any of her limbs. She jerks upright, a sharp, unsteady movement that spins wildly around her. Before she can help it, she’s puking and choking, everything coming up and out all at once as firm hands hold her head over a bucket. 

“Hey,” Max whispers, somewhere beyond the haze in her eyes. “Hey...hey-” She’d grab for him, but her balance is a broken compass, she’s careening out of control and she can’t feel her human arm-  _ she can’t feel her arm- _

“Easy now,” says someone else, a woman, and for a dizzying second, she wonders how long they’ve been gone that Cheedo’s voice has changed so much. “It’s all right, we’ve got you.”

A callused hand comes down on her stump, and it’s Max, she knows his hands- “Can’t  _ feel _ -” she gasps.

“It’s there,” he chokes out, “it’s there-”

“You’ve lost some blood,” the woman says. “Steady there.”

His hand moves up, and then he’s holding her upright, hard and firm and steady. The blackness slowly retreats, and she finally sees him sitting there. He’s missing his jacket, his shirt sleeve rolled up with a long red tube connecting his arm to hers. 

He’s giving her his blood, and and she’s  _ lying _ to him-

Her body is uncontrollable and distant, all her muscles shuddering violently and out of sync, snot and tears and whatever meager contents of her stomach-

“You’ve been shot,” the woman says, and she realizes it’s Jane, Jane of the people without the satellites. “I’ve just numbed you so I can stitch it up. It’s so far past its expiration that I don’t know if it’s even working,” she adds, ”but it can’t do anything but help.”

Numb. She is anything but numb. Her heart isn’t even beating, it’s just one long, churning rush. She wants to be sick again, but there's nothing to bring up. Her human arm is disconnected, nothing, a loose, heavy piece of flesh that she knows is connected but she can’t  _ feel _ it-

Max’s forehead is pressed against her other shoulder, the sharpness of his breath a mirror to her own. The arm with the cannula unnaturally stiff, his other hand clutched under her stump as he crouches next to the cot. She can feel him shaking. “It’s there,” he whispers fiercely. “Look at it. Look.”

She’s looking, but she can’t make a fist, can’t feel her fingers. She can’t ask if she’s going to lose it. Her phantom hand is on fire, both her hands are on fire, flesh and bone vaporized beyond ash-

“Well,” Jane says, “the good news is that the bullet didn’t stick.”

“Nerve damage,” Max clenches out. 

“I wasn’t even a doctor before,” she says absently. “I was going to be a dental hygienist. Barely started school. I got called up halfway through my first year.” She glances up from her sutures. “They made me a medic. I didn’t know a femur from a fistula, and then I was elbow-deep in some poor bloke’s chest.”

The force of the bombs from Before is nothing compared to the look Max gives her.

“It should be fine,” she reassures them. “It’s a through-and-through. Those are the best, if you have to have one.”

“I know,” Furiosa says, but the room is too dark and too damp and too old, and her throat is clenched so tightly she can barely speak. 

There’s silence for a long time, the only noise Max’s rough breathing in the hollow of her shoulder. She feels light, detached, as if she’s been consumed by this room and its creeping obsolescence. Somewhere above her human arm, the arm that’s not dead, that  _ can’t _ be dead, there’s the small, unnatural movement of Jane’s needle. Her shirt’s been cut away and the scraps are stiff with dried blood. The chill prickle of the air crawls against naked flesh, and she leans against Max, the only solid point she’s ever known.

It’s only when Jack says, “How much longer is this going to take?” that she realizes he’s standing by the door, a menacing figure with his useless automatic rifle. 

“It’s going to take as long as it takes,” Jane says calmly. “If you have other things to do, feel free to leave.”

“And leave you with them?” He snorts. “Not fucking likely.”

“I’ve got a needle in her skin, and he’s giving blood,” Jane retorts. “How lethal do they look to you?”

Furiosa feels about as far from lethal as she has ever been. Max growls into her shoulder; if anyone tried anything, she’s sure he’d shred them. He looks as shattered as she feels, and he’s all the more dangerous for it. 

“That gun’s still empty,” Jane points out. 

Jack bares his teeth. “Cunt.”

She stops stitching long enough to stare him down. “If this is a pissing contest, I won’t win on distance, but I will kick your ass on volume, and you fucking know it. Either shut up, or get out of my infirmary.” She raises an eyebrow. “If either of them wants to kill me, they’re more than welcome to try.” Max makes another noise into Furiosa’s shoulder. “Do it,” Jane says. “I’ve got nothing left here, and if it means I don’t have to keep checking their fucking prostates, it’ll be a moment too soon.”

“We have an agreement here,” Jack starts. 

“Agreements go both ways,” she snaps, and goes back to sewing with a hand that's calmer than it should be.

“Fuck you,” says Jack. “I hope they do kill you.”

“If I could only be so lucky,” she returns, and he stalks out.

She continues to stitch, humming a little to herself. “Don't bother trying to forgive Jack,” Jane says amiably. “He should be able to check his own prostate by now; he's had his head up his ass for long enough.” She turns to Max. “You can take that out. No reason to bleed you both out.”

He hesitates, glancing up at Furiosa. She nods as if she can somehow tell, as if it’s her call, the room shifting with the motion. Gently, carefully, he pinches the cannula and removes the needle, pressing a scrap of bandage to the elbow of her stump.

As Jane works, she looks over Furiosa’s back, the webbing of seven thousand days of scars under the tattered remnants of her shirt. She makes a small noise of sympathy. “I know it’s hard out there,” she murmurs, “but you’ve had a rough go of it, the both of you.”

“No more than most,” Furiosa says tightly. She can’t feel the pain of the stitches themselves, only the strange, distant tugging as the sutures are tied. 

“Kai was a medic once, too,” Jane adds. “He and Ava, well…wasn’t always just the four of us, I’ll say that.” She takes a breath and looks right at Furiosa. “Is there anything else I can help with?”

Jane knows. She'd seen the dizziness. She knows something's wrong, and she's asking.

Now. She has to do it now. 

Jane is a healer, that much is clear, which means now is the time to talk about it. Furiosa needs to ask about it, if anything can be done, if it’s even possible to do anything about it in the first place. Her head is spinning, her whole body spinning like a bullet from a poorly-rifled gun-

In the haze, it’s still there. It’s still the thing she’s fighting, the thing she dreads more than anything she’s ever dreaded in her life. If she waits any longer, he’s going to notice, he’s going to  _ realize _ , if he hasn’t already, and once he knows, she’s going to lose him. He won’t walk away, but she remembers his face when it hadn’t been true, when he’d only thought it was, and now she thinks it  _ is _ , and she can’t do this to him. He’ll stay because he’ll think he has to, and if they lose this - which they will, of course they will; they’re in the middle of nowhere, thirty days of hostile territory between them and the Citadel, a hundred and fifty days skirting the edges, with starvation and the brutal sun dogging them at every step - he is going to die all over again, and she will never, ever get him back. She can’t hurt him this way. He has to go before he knows, and she’s too much of a coward to make him go if she hasn’t confirmed it for herself.

Even if he doesn’t know, even if she doesn’t tell him, he won’t go on his own; she knows this like she knows how to breathe. She’ll have to do something unforgivable, something so heinous and terrible that he’ll have no other option but to turn away and never come back. She doesn’t know what that crime will be, but in this moment, her head whirling and her skull pounding in her ears, she has to take that first step.

She has no other option. 

She looks at him, where he’s sitting on the cot next to her, his entire face taut with worry. “I need you to leave,” she says quietly, surprised at the calm authority in her voice. She doesn't feel it. She is a blur of guilt and adrenaline, dizzy from pain and blood loss.

_ Need _ , not  _ want _ . Someday she might tell him the distinction, if she has the chance. She doesn’t  _ want _ , not at all. The needing and wanting are two pistons in the same engine, working against each other and tearing the whole thing apart.

“ _ No _ -” the word bursts out like she’s punched him in the gut, and in his eyes she sees the white panic of old agony and remembered helplessness, and she  _ can’t _ do this to him, not after what's just happened, not when her blood is still on his shirt, but she  _ is _ . “We can-”

“Please.”

He looks wildly from her to the medic and back again. “No...” and it’s so horribly plaintive and lost that it’s worse than anything she’s ever said or done. It hurts more than any wound she’s ever received, worse than the argument they’d had over the Glow’s poison. It’s worse than when she’d gone to the Bullet Farm and left him behind to wonder if she’d ever make it out. She’s ripping both of them to pieces, but she desperately, desperately needs to. She has to hurt him now, so she knows how badly she has to hurt him later. 

“Maybe just a few minutes?” Jane offers. “You could wait outside?”

He gives her a long, searching look, as if this is the last time he’s ever going to see her, and fuck, Furiosa is on the edge of snapping completely, a rotted strut about to snap under a heavy load. “Max. Please.”

“She didn’t,” he croaks. “I went, and she was-”

His woman. The mother of his son. She realizes in a hot rush that whatever happened, he’s from somewhere that had been untouched, somewhere that existed in the liminal space between Before and now. He was a cop, something with letters that she doesn't understand but these people knew instantly, something that made them understand him and honor his word, and if that’s all true, then his place, his home - there had to have been something like this. His woman had gone into a room like this, and whatever had happened, she hadn’t come out. 

The weight of what she’s asking him to do is crushing.  

She almost tells him, almost blurts it out right there, because it can’t possibly be worse than this, but she can't, because maybe his  _ son  _ was the reason his woman didn’t come out of that room. He’s never said how old his son was, just that he died, they both died, and then Max died along with them. He’s said he didn’t see his son’s birth or his death, but he’s never said if those two events happened on the same day, and suddenly, wildly, she wonders if they  _ did _ . 

She can’t do that to him, can’t offer him something that could very easily be taken away. She  _ can’t _ . If this isn’t real, if it’s somehow nothing, if it’s truly impossible and she’s been thrown off-track by the sun and the waste - she’ll tell him then. They’ll have a fight - a huge, enormous, brutal fight - but it won’t be their end. 

If it’s real, if this is something that’s actually happening, something they’ve actually done, an impossibility that’s somehow breached a line she'd never, ever thought would be crossed-

“Please,” she says again, and he’s fighting it, but in the end he can’t refuse her, and fuck, she knows that. She’s using that weakness against him as surely as if she’d delivered a hard kick straight to his bad knee. 

“Right outside,” he whispers, a stuttering gesture to the door. “Be-”

“Five minutes,” she says. “Just- five minutes.”

He can’t nod. He can't even talk. He walks backwards, shellshocked and dazed, and closes the door with shaking hands.


	7. Chapter 7

Jane is looking at her with immense concern. “What is it?”

This is happening. It has to, and it has to happen now. She doesn’t trust Jane, she doesn’t trust any of them, but she has no other options. She has nothing. It’s trusting Jane or it’s a slow death for her and Max, and-

“I think,” and the words come out strangled, like she’s talking with a hand on her throat, a hand that’s squeezing the life out of her. She’s not sure how she’s still upright, but she makes herself swallow back the dizziness. She glances back at the closed door, a sharp, reflexive movement. “...it shouldn’t- I _can’t_ , but I think-”

She can’t even say it. She chokes on it, but Jane sees the way her naked stump spasms over her belly, and somehow understands anyway.

Jane’s eyes light up before she can stop herself. “No,” she breathes, clearly delighted, and then quickly, “I can't say I didn't think it. Neither of you look sick, radiation or whatever diseases are out there - well, how could I even tell if you were, me stuck in here all these years. And the two of you, a man and a woman - a _woman_ , I'm so sorry, but you have no idea how refreshing that is - the first we've seen in _years_ , like a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve, and so _young,_ the both of you…” Jane pauses. “But you're asking me, and I'm running my mouth. When did you last bleed?”

“No pattern,” Furiosa says. The enthusiasm is choking, but if this is the price... “Ten days, a hundred-”

“That's fine, that's fine, you're so thin, and God only knows what's out there - but the most recent?”

She casts her mind back. It had been before they’d left the Citadel, so light she’d almost missed it. She thinks of Vuvalini timekeeping, of counting in things other than days, but the math slides though her head. “...almost two hundred...I don’t-”

“That’s okay,” Jane says reasonably. Her eyes flick over Furiosa’s face in a way that’s too excited, too knowing. “It’s okay. I can try and check, if you want-” and she makes a vague hand gesture that Furiosa knows all too well.

Her vision tunnels, every single muscle of her body clenching at once- “ _No_ -” This is what she’s here for, what she’s wanted, it’s why she’s sent Max away, but suddenly she can’t breathe, can’t run, the Organic Mechanic’s hands pushing roughly inside-

“No one is going to touch you without your consent,” Jane says, abruptly stone-solid and fierce. Her searching appraisal changes tone. “Not me, not anyone here. I can try and confirm, but it’s your choice, no one else’s.”

She doesn’t believe her, she has to _move_ , but her legs aren’t responding, her lungs, _nothing_ is responding-

“Max,” Jane goes on, her voice low and gentle. “He came in with you, and I just assumed, but I shouldn't have, not in this world. Does he hurt you?”

“No!” The word bursts out, along with a hard spurt of anger, because how _dare_ she, and Furiosa’s already weightless as lightning- “He’s reliable, he wouldn’t _ever_ -”

“I just needed to know,” Jane assures her. “We could protect you, if you needed us to.”

She shouldn’t laugh, but she’s more than half-hysterical, and she can’t control what her lungs are doing. She knows that even if they had bullets, this place is a dying fortress, and she’s the Bag of Nails. There’s enough blood on her hands to drown this entire building, and some part of her is still itching to add these people to her pile of corpses. The only reason she’s not a warlord is because she’s _chosen_ not to be, and for Jane to offer her protection? But Jane doesn’t know what she’s done - none of them know, not even Max fully knows - and Furiosa isn’t willing to say. “I can protect myself.”

“You killed Joe Moore,” Jane says. “I don’t know how; I don’t really want you to tell me. I’m not saying you need help. I certainly don’t believe you do, and certainly not against Max, not from what I’ve seen, but...if you did need help, or something like it, we could offer it.”

Offer. Offers come with obligations, with debts. She’s buried under debts, and these people are more dead than alive. They have nothing to offer her. At the same time, she needs this, she needs what no one but Jane can tell her, and she has no other option. She’s on a timeline, and the worst part is that she doesn’t even know when the countdown started.

“How far along do you think you are?” Jane asks.

In the Vault, she’d had to know, but since then, she’s aggressively forgotten. Between the bad water and the heat, she can’t begin to tell. “I don’t know.”

“When did the nausea begin? The dizziness?”

The bad water. Or was it before then? All the days run together. She’s been wracking her brain and coming up with nothing. The water is a solid marker, as solid as she has. “Water was sour,” she manages. “We drank anyway. Thirty days, or thirty-two.”

Jane frowns. “Are you sure it’s not the water still? What makes you suspect?”

“It’s been too long.” She draws a shaky breath. “He got better.”

“Have you been pregnant before?”

“No.” This, almost a whisper. She can’t explain the magnitude of that answer. She hadn’t even explained it to Mari, not completely, and she is _not_ going explain it to Jane right now, not when the medic is all but salivating for this to be true.

 _All you girls, then_ , Mari had said. The Green Place had gone sour long before the Vuvalini left, and Furiosa, Val, Tamar - but Tamar once admitted Tremble was three months along when she’d been shot down, and Tremble had been the youngest- “I can’t. They said I can’t-”

“Who said?”

Jane doesn’t get to know about the Organic Mechanic, about the Vault and Joe and all the rest. Jane doesn’t need to know. None of them need to know. They know Furiosa is dangerous, and that’s the only leverage she has. She’s already risking too much with this conversation, but the risk in not talking is far greater. She will not compound that risk by laying her past out in front of Jane like the entrails of some sacrificial animal.

She shuts her mouth with the sharp click of teeth, and doesn’t answer.

Jane tugs at another suture. “You said Max is reliable. Is he your partner?”

Of course he’s her partner. He’s the one who loads the rifle and hands it to her when she’s taking the shot, the one who drives while she sleeps-

That’s not what Jane means, but that makes it such an archaic term she’s not sure. “As in-?”

“It’s none of my business,” Jane says, “but woman-to-woman, if I can, I’m asking if you think he’s the father.”

She does, and he _can’t_ be. She doesn’t know how to explain this. She doesn’t _want_ to explain this. His past is his own, his nightmares his own, and that he’s shared them with her doesn’t mean she’s free to share them with anyone else.

She doesn’t know how to answer. She thinks of Joe, of the War Boys calling him Daddy, of his delight in the name and absolute horror of his efforts to sire children. She thinks of the conversation with Max when he’d thought it had happened before, how he’d been a tight knot of more emotion than he could express. “There’s no one else,” she says, because it’s the only way to explain without actually telling Jane. She doesn’t want to be telling Jane _anything_ , but if this painfully desperate interrogation is the only way…

She’s afraid she’s woozy enough that she’s saying too much. If Max were here, he’d keep her in check, but he can’t be. She can’t make him cover her and deal with the reality of this. She has to muscle through the pain alone, through the seductive dark at the edge of her vision.

Jane purses her lips. “Does he know?”

“No.” But she knows he pays attention. He’s made it very clear he thinks about these things, and could tell if- “I don’t know.” She can’t bring it up, but she’ll have to, she _has_ to. He must already know. He can’t not-

She’ll give him the chance to run. She’ll make it clear he doesn’t have to stay. She can _make_ him run. She can handle this.

That’s a lie. She has no idea what to do. Every moment more is one step closer to a complete and terrified breakdown, for both of them. She’s already almost lost him once, and stood on the edge of madness as a consequence. His blood runs in her veins again and again, and his _seed_ -

“What do you want to do?” Jane asks, the question almost sad. “This doesn’t seem like it would be good news.” Distantly, Furiosa realizes there have been no babies here. There can’t have been, or if there were, they’re dead or long gone, and a very large part of Jane obviously, fervently, desperately wants this to be real, one last small life before this place crumbles into dust.

Her brain is blank and screaming. She doesn’t know what she wants to do. In the Vault, she’d prayed for it, hoped for it, anything that would save her life, anything that would just _make them stop touching her_. Later, she was grateful, painfully grateful, because she’d watched too many other women bleed to death or be drowned for their failure. Her instinct is to kill it, to expel it like a parasite so she doesn’t have to face everything it means, everything it represents. In another life, she’d be happy about this, overjoyed even, because it’s Max, because of the way he was with the children at Next Exit and War Pups, and she’s _never_ felt- not with anyone, not with anyone but him-

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

One final, painless tug, and then Jane is wiping down the wound with a cool, damp cloth. “There, all done. I’m going to bandage this, and you’ll be on your way. The stitches will dissolve in a week or so, and fall out on their own. You lost a decent amount of blood, but your man topped you up, and I've got it closed enough that any bleeding should be minimal. You got lucky he's a universal donor.” She dabs at the wound. “Furiosa, if I can ask, do you know how old you are?”

The Vuvalini measured time in years and months, and she’d been somewhere between child and adult when she’d been stolen. She doesn’t know how much time she’s lost.

“Seventeen years,” she says, hoarse, “and seven thousand days. Another two thousand. There are more I don’t remember.”

Jane blinks. “That’s...a lot of counting.” She frowns, calculating. “Forty-one, then.”

It feels like such a small number, compared to the thousands. It feels like it means nothing.

“You could also be entering menopause,” Jane goes on thoughtfully. “You’re young yet, but it’s hard out there, and if your periods are so irregular...”

“So maybe it’s not…?”

“I don’t know. There used to be tests,” Jane says, wistful. “Good, fast, reliable tests, but even if we had any, they would have expired decades ago, and I wouldn’t trust them to give the right answer.” She searches Furiosa's face. “Is this why you wanted to find the satellites, because maybe they'd have a lab?”

“No.” That was for medicine, for Cheedo, for the Citadel as a whole. Anything else is incidental.

If it’s true, she's going to lose everything for this, this incident, this impossibility.

Jane gets up and goes to a pile of books on a desk in the corner, covered in cobwebs and almost completely hidden by shadow. She runs her fingers over the spines until she finds what she’s looking for, and blows the dust off as she pulls it out. “If you're not comfortable me touching you, I think I only have one other thing I can try,” she says, flipping through pages gone rippled and water-stained. “I'm going to offer it.”

She doesn't know, but she _knows_. She knows that tone of voice. Her whole body clenches. Fingers stretching and probing-

She can do this. She’s an Imperator. She will not suffer this. She is _better_ than this. She has burned villages to the ground, she ripped the face off of the man who called himself He Who Grabbed The Sun, she can do whatever she needs to do, and she will _not_ flinch-

“I think I can do an ultrasound.”

That stops her in her tracks. “A what?”

“I don’t even know if it even still works,” Jane’s going on. “It’s been so long, and our power…”

Her heart’s still racing in her chest. “How does it work?” The Mechanic had tried everything, everything, had sworn to Joe the tests were exhaustive-

“It’s not invasive,” Jane says. “I barely have to touch you.”

“I don’t understand.”

It’s a device. Jane shows her. It’s covered in a thick layer of dust like the books, yellowed like plastic that’s rotted by the sun. It looks vaguely like Toast’s radio. “This part,” Jane says. “I run it over your belly, and it shows me what’s inside on that screen.”

It feels like the satellites, mysterious and opaque. “Nothing goes inside,” she says fiercely, except...she’d let her. She’d have to. Anything that needs to be done can’t possibly be worse than the look on Max’s face when the truth of his dead son is wrenched from his lungs.

He’d been before, and she hadn’t known enough to properly understand-

“Nothing goes inside.” Jane’s eyes flick across Furiosa’s face. “You said he owned you-”

“I _killed_ him.” This, with all the weight and fury she carried as an Imperator and still carries now, and it makes Jane blink and sit slightly back.

There a long pause. “I apologize for doubting you, then. May I have your permission to try this?”

“It has to work.” It _has_ to. The uncertainty is shredding her.

“If it’s too early, I might not be able to tell.”

Furiosa narrows her eyes. “How early.”

“Six weeks is the usual limit.” Jane pauses, consulting the book. “But...if you’ve counted the days right, if you started getting sick when you said you did, if this was not expected...perhaps you might not have noticed so early...I think you might be much further along.”

All at once, she feels like she’s going to vomit again, but there’s nothing, nothing above or below except awful, awful anticipation and the possibility of solid mass she can’t actually feel. “How far?” She’s torturing herself; she doesn’t want to know, but she can’t let go of this. If nothing can be done, if it can only be confirmed but not stopped, she _needs_ to know her timeline, and the only way to find out is right now. She doesn’t remember enough from the Vault to figure it out herself and she has no other option; there are no other options.

She suddenly misses Mari and her practical steadiness very, very fiercely.

“Ava was- she was the last time I’d had to check,” Jane says quietly, “and she was very early, too early...” She’s paging through the book until she finds the section she wants. “Most women start getting sick around six or seven weeks. If that’s true for you, if that’s when you started noticing-”

She knows weeks, knows them from when she was small. Seven days in a week, and that was _before_ -

Forty-two days. Her body is ice, her blood is ice in her veins. If this is real, if it’s happened despite everything, she’s held it inside of her for _forty-two days_ -

Jane’s lips twist in sympathy. “If you are pregnant, I think you’re probably closer to ten.”

The ice is drowning her, and then she’s down, Jane’s firm hands guiding her head between her legs as she heaves into the bucket.

Seventy. _Seventy._ This is worse than she’s thought. This is _so much worse_. It would have happened right after Max got sick, right after the Glow. She’s carried it around, not knowing, riding beside him and not knowing, sleeping beside him and not _knowing_ -

Let him fuck her, _wanted_ him to fuck her, and when this was already-

She needs Mari. She needs Mari so very, very badly, and Mari is _gone_ , and suddenly she’s crying, hot, gut-wrenching tears as she’s hunched over the bucket, the world throbbing around her.

Jane hums, almost like Mari would, and it makes Furiosa clench even harder. Her fingers move in small, gentle circles in Furiosa’s scalp. “They called Joe Moore a hero because he won,” Jane says quietly. “But he only won because he did everything that was possible, and what was possible was not always good.” She pauses, her hand drifting down toward the brand but not touching it. “Max is not the man who hurt you.”

She doesn't ask directly, but Furiosa hears it anyway.

“No,” Furiosa chokes out. “He's the first one who hasn't.”

He’s the first one who hasn’t, and because of that, she’s going to hit him right where it hurts most, and she’s already sure she means to.


	8. Chapter 8

When she's wrung herself dry, Jane sits her back up, tucking a towel over her shoulder to absorb any breakthrough bleeding. Furiosa is shivering hard, and a blanket comes from somewhere, rough and unbearably musty.

“If I leave for a moment, will you be all right?” Jane asks.

Furiosa has no choice but to be all right. She huddles under the blanket and makes herself nod.

Jane gives her a stern look. “If you feel faint, please lie down. You’ll pop your stitches if you hit the floor.”

Healers, Furiosa thinks, are the same everywhere.

At the door, Jane pauses. “They’re going to want to keep you separated,” she says. “I can make the case that you shouldn’t be.”

There’s still the test to be done. He's going mad out there, she's sure of it, and mothers, she needs his warmth and steadiness more than anything right now. She can’t explain the test to him without explaining why she needs it, and she doesn’t know how he’ll react.

Besides, if he’s gone out, Jack won’t let him back in. She already knows this, and it’s pointless to argue. She shakes her head.

“I didn’t think so,” Jane says quietly, and closes the door behind her.

She wants to think she can hear him yelling. She wants to pretend that he’s not. She wants him to pound down the door and she wants him to stay away, and more than anything, she wants this to be over.

She can’t hear anything, but the rasp of her own breath.

Seventy days along, and another thirty back to the Citadel. She can’t avoid him, can’t avoid his body. She can keep her girdle strapped painfully tight, but he’s going to want to touch her, and - fuck, she can’t go thirty days without touching him herself. He’ll know. There’s no way he won’t. The bigger girls in the Vault showed the fastest, and she’s lean as hell, but he sees everything-

She can’t even say the words to herself. How the fuck can she say them to him?

When Jane comes back, she’s carrying a mug. “Don’t make that face, it’s tea,” she says. “Or...what passes for tea around here anymore. It’s weak, but it’ll help.” She sits down across from her. “Can you feel enough of your hand to hold it?”

She can’t. She doesn’t want to drink it anyway, just tuck it between her thighs and curl around its warmth.

Jane moves the chair closer to the cot and leans forward. “What do you want to do?”

She’s caught in a fog of uncertainty. She doesn’t know, but she also _doesn’t know_ , and she’s not sure she can handle the truth if it’s real. She’ll have to tell Max - she has to, and she wants to tell him first, tell him _right now_ , because if it’s the truth, she can’t handle this weight on her own, but if it’s not real, if it’s something mysterious, something else she’s not thinking of - if it’s all powder and no bullet, she doesn’t want to put him through this. She can’t.

Underneath the blanket, she tucks her stump across her chest, feeling the steam of the tea on her elbow. “Test,” she says through clenched teeth. “I have to.”

“It’s a good idea,” Jane agrees. “At least you’ll know.”

She’s doing this. She’s committed. There’s no turning back, so she just has to fang it.

 _If you want to get through this, do as I say. Now pick up what you can and run_. She’d said that to Angharad. Now she’s repeating it to herself, except she has nothing to pick up except whatever meager information Jane can offer.

“Now,” she says, “I want to do it now.”

“Let me see if we’ve got enough power. We’re losing the reactor. Fifteen year of fuel, and Petey managed to eke out more. He kept it going as long as he could,” Jane says, adding sadly, “Longer than him, even. It’s dying like a sun now, a thousand feet under and slowly going dim.” She coughs, and straightens up. “But the least we can do it try.”

The worst-case scenario is that they hook it up to the car battery, but she can’t do that without Max knowing. “Is this machine always used this way?”

“It’s a medical device, yes.” Jane uncoils the cord, fits it into a socket in the wall. “Here, it’s used for tendons, muscles, that sort of thing. I’ve looked at hearts and lungs. Not much call here for looking for babies, but that’s what most people used to know it for. Can't say I'm not a little bit - I'm sorry. Ava’s, well, we were all so… It's just been so long. It really has nothing to do with you.”

Max had a child. He must know about this device, if he’s from a place that hung on to the things and customs of Before. There’s no way she could pretend otherwise, but...tendons. Muscles. “Knees,” she says. “You could look at a knee.”

“I can look,” Jane says soberly. “But his limp looks bad, and I don’t have the resources to do surgery.”

The breath rushes out of her. She’d hoped for one wild moment-

There are two lights in the room, and Jane reaches up to unscrew one of them. “Might work,” she says, and bites her lip as she powers up the machine. The remaining light flickers, but stays on.

“You haven’t seen anything like this before, have you?” Jane points to the box at the top that’s suddenly started glowing.

 _Glowing_ -

Furiosa just about launches herself off the cot, and Jane grabs at her. “It's okay, it's _okay_ -”

“Hot-” she gasps, everything spinning, Max burning and dying-

“It's not, it's just a screen, like a light bulb!”

Blackness still claws at the edge of her vision. “Detector,” she manages.

“It's not hot,” Jane repeats. “Nothing down here is radioactive. This is just light, just normal, harmless light.”

It's not blue. It's not even bright, just a faint brown glow.

If it's hot, maybe it will kill her, or kill what's inside of her.

“It's just light,” Jane says. “It shows me what the transducer-” she lifts the thing that looks like Toast’s radio input- “sees inside of you. It's sound that we can’t hear. It isn't harmful. It doesn't hurt. I used to have some gel to make it work better, but anything we’ve got...”

She doesn’t have to say. Anything useful dried up long ago. Furiosa thinks of Mari, of her delight at finding the unopened cache of supplies hidden by the previous Organic Mechanic. She wonders what Mari could have done with something like this, if the chemists at Gastown could make the proper fluid.

She swallows hard. This is the only way she's going to know, without waiting so long it becomes obvious. “Do it, then.”

Jane nods. “If you’re ready, I need to have you laying down.” The tea goes elsewhere. It’s a hard thing to move, but Jane’s hands are strong. “I’m sorry to say, but I need to lift your shirt. I have to be in contact with skin.”

Furiosa can’t lift it herself. Her human arm is numb, and she can’t manage with her stump. She swallows hard as Jane folds the blanket down over her legs, and then very gently tucks Furiosa’s shirt up under her breasts. Her shirt is going to need sewing anyway, from they’d cut it away to stitch her. At least they only sliced the laces on her girdle - Max, she knows it was Max, thoughtful even in panic.

Max, confident she’d survive to lace it back up. Max, waiting outside, even though it’s been far longer than five minutes. Max, slowly dying because she asked him to.

She has to hurt him now, so she doesn’t hurt him later.

“Are you alright?” Jane asks. “If you tell me to stop, I will.”

Seventy days. More than.

Jane is not the Mechanic. Furiosa has the option to kill her if she needs to. She can fight back. She isn’t the terrified girl she once was.

She can breathe through this.

“I’m going to start now.” Jane pauses. “If there’s anything, it’ll be on this screen.”

She doesn’t know if she can look. She doesn’t know if she _can’t_ look.

She wants to wall herself off, but she isn’t going to. Joe doesn’t own her anymore, any part of her, and if this is true, if she and Max have-

Her human arm is numb, her phantom hand clenching and screaming, her heart pounding in her throat. She needs to see it. She needs to be present for this, to witness it.

She _will_ handle this. She _will_ accept this. She was an Imperator, and now she is not. She has been freed by her own hand and in doing so, taken down the leadership of an entire region. She has driven a hundred and fifty days, and she’s somehow earned Max’s trust despite herself. If this is something that has to happen, she will follow it through, and she will not let herself drive off the road.

She wants this to be Mari. She wants this to be Cheedo, even. She doesn’t want to be lying here with her human arm terrifyingly numb and her belly painfully exposed as someone she doesn’t know, someone she doesn’t fully trust, tries to reveal the fate of her future. She wraps her stump around her chest, hugging herself as best she can and trying to remember how to breathe.

The thing Jane called the transducer is cold against her skin, and she tries very hard not to choke.

All this time, she's thought the people with the satellites would have answers, that somehow, they would _be_ the answers. She'd thought maybe this place would know, but it doesn't. She looks at the glowing screen, the faint shuddery lines that move without any sense of direction, at the dust on the device. The room has a single buzzing light bulb, the walls clean but slowly peeling.

If this is from Before, she knows exactly how Before died. This facility, this bunker - it's three old men and one old woman, hanging onto the past just as surely as the ones who never left the Green Place. There's no one else here; she doesn't know how she knows, but she does. This place smells like age and emptiness, of a creeping stagnation heavier than rot.

Joe had convinced his half-life War Boys that a historic death would lead them to Valhalla. Furiosa didn't buy into that, but suddenly she wonders if he had a point. Oliver, Kai, Jane - these people knew him, so maybe he'd been inside a bunker like this. Maybe he'd seen this slow, cloying death and turned against it, granting his chattel a way for the sickest among them to die quickly and cleanly, witnessed and unafraid.

Joe was one of those that killed the world, but lying on a threadbare cot in this decaying bunker, she thinks she understands why he'd thought he was saving it.

“You don't want a child,” Jane says quietly. “And I don't see one.”


	9. Chapter 9

 Her whole body seems to disappear. She thinks she makes a noise, or means to make a noise-

“You’re not pregnant,” Jane says, and points to the screen, to a quivering blackness amid the shuddery lines. “This is your uterus. If there was a fetus here,” she gestures to a portion of the blackness, “this is where it would probably be.”

“Are you sure-” This, choked out, hope and terror and relief all clogging her throat at once. “Have to be-”

“This machine is old,” Jane says, “but the picture isn’t as bad as I’d feared. At ten weeks...there’d be something, I’m sure of it. It’s been a long time, but that’s not an image one forgets.” She moves the transducer. “These are your muscles. Here’s your hip bone. Those, I can see.” Back to the amorphous black. “Look here. There’s nothing, nothing here to become a child.”

The relief crashes down, huge and flooding and she can’t breathe, but she _can_ , she can breathe for the first time in thirty - in _seventy_ \- days, every gasp pulling hard at the stitches in her shoulder, but she can’t fucking care.

When she can find the air to speak, she manages, “...how?” How did this happen, if there isn’t what she thought it was, why has she felt the way she has, why is she sick-

“Here,” Jane says, and moves the transducer upwards and outwards, pointing to a spot on the screen. It’s smaller than the blackness but still black itself, a thin webbing like spider silk stretching across it. “Right here.”

She doesn’t understand.

“It’s called a cyst.”

She hears herself say, “I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s a mass on your ovary. It’s unusual, but sometimes the symptoms can mimic pregnancy.”

Mimic. It’s a word Miss Giddy would use. Animals mimic plants to escape from their predators.  “Is it bad?”

“It could be tested, to see if it’s malignant.”

Another word of Miss Giddy’s. It means angry, vicious. She doesn’t know what it means in this context, but she can guess. She thinks of Mari, of how she’d known her body was turning against her. She wonders if Mari had something malignant, too.

“I don’t know.” There’s been a dull ache in her side for almost a hundred days, but she’s assumed it was her missing arm or a pulled muscle, or the blood she’s lately been so desperate to see.

“There’s a chance it’s benign,” Jane says, but the expression on her face says she doesn’t believe it. Nothing in the Wasteland is benign, and mothers, Furiosa knows it.

The room is painfully old, the blanket cloying with must. The screen is blurry in her bad eye, the lone remaining light casting deep shadows around the room. It’s medical equipment, all of it, a wealth of technology. She’s suddenly, painfully sure that most of it hasn’t been used in thousands of days and very soon, none of it will ever be used again.  

Mari’s voice echoes in her ears: _All you girls, then._

She doesn’t even know what to ask.

“It’s called a biopsy,” Jane says. “It’s a needle. Before, they’d check and be able to tell you in an hour.”

Needles. Needles and probes, shots and powders that made her swell up, set her body on fire and made her scream for hours, until her voice died and her throat bled.

“I can’t do a biopsy.” Jane says quietly. “Once, but not now. I would if I could.”

Furiosa can’t decide if that’s better or worse, and it makes her sit up, clawing through the dizziness to demand, “Why?” The question comes out shaky and more than a little angry. “Why are you doing this?”

She’s not sure if she’s asking why Jane is helping her, or why Jane is telling her things that can’t be done.

Jane is silent a long time, and Furiosa wonders if she’s overstepped her bounds, if she’s demanding more than she can have. This is already a one-sided transaction: first the stitches, and then the device from Before that can somehow see inside her. Maybe she shouldn’t be asking this, but any kindness or restraint she’d once had has been thoroughly beaten out of her. If there is payment to be rendered, she needs to know what it is, and she will not mince words during the negotiation.

“Our world is lost,” Jane says finally. “We’re what’s left. You - you can survive out there. We wouldn’t make it a day.” She looks down at her lap. “I can’t do anything here. I know that. We’ve been hiding for so long… Do you understand what it means for you to be here? We hadn’t opened our doors in _years,_ and then the radio died and we couldn’t fix it. We couldn’t. Petey was gone, Ava, Noah, Melody, all of them. We _tried,_ we tried everything, but it’s all burnt, all crusted away, just like us. When it broke, I wanted us to try for Pine Gap - even walking, we could have _tried -_ but we didn’t make it a single klick: a dust storm blew in, and we barely made it back. Oliver said it was a sign, and that was that. I _hate_ -” her voice shakes, and in her lap, her hands go to angry fists. “I _hate_ them. I hate all three of them. I hated them before, and I hate them now.” She turns her face up to Furiosa. “I stabbed Jack once. Right in the neck. It was a dinner fork. It was all I had, and I almost killed him, but the bastard _moved_ , and Oliver...Oliver made me patch him up, stood over me with his gun to my head. That was when we still had bullets. I wish I’d let him shoot me. I wish-”

She swallows. “There were more raiders, once. Not many now, not in a long time, but that’s where the bullets went. You’re the first people we’ve seen in almost six years; maybe there’s been more, but we haven’t opened up, and they haven’t tried to get in. We thought everyone else was dead, and then _you_ came, and you asked about the satellites, and I thought- I thought you were from Pine Gap. And here you are, knowing even less than we do.”

Furiosa knows that rage, that desperation. Her phantom arm clenches, and she presses her stump against her chest. Wanting to leave, but even worse: _trying_ to leave and failing.

“I had a daughter, before.” It comes out slowly, painfully, like the words are being pulled from under an entire dune of loose sand. “She’d be- I think she’d be your age.”

“What was her name?” It’s the only thing Furiosa can can say.

“Grace,” Jane says. “Her name was Grace.”

It sounds like a Vuvalini name, something tangible, something with meaning. Furiosa, named for blazing anger. Valkyrie, the mythical women who decided who lived and who died. Tamar, the goddess who might someday bring back the rain. Tremble, whose words would shake the foundations of the earth.

“I can’t rebuild the world,” Jane says bitterly. “I can’t even leave. You, though - you’re going to survive; you already are, and I can’t do a damn thing to help but sew you up and try to tell you what I know.”

Jane is so much like Mari, but she's what Mari might have become if she'd never left the Green Place. She's what Mari might have become if she'd stayed with the invisible, insidious poison, if her sisters had taken their anger inside of them and let it slowly warp and fester. Furiosa knew her mothers were from the cusp of Before, but aside from the rare fits of nostalgia usually unlocked by the warmth of peach liqueur, they'd never spoken of it. It was called Before for a reason: it was the hard labor of a difficult birth, and once the child was born, the pain was quickly eclipsed by the joy of its growth.

Furiosa has no right to think of children, not when she's half-drunk in the lassitude of relief.

Jane, though: Jane is trapped in more ways than one. She's still living as if Now is only the inevitable extension of Before, and not a living, breathing organism of its own. She's being crushed by it.

“I’d kill them right now,” Jane says, “but there’s three of them, and I can’t take all three at once.”

Furiosa could. Even in her current state, she could take them, but she’s not sure if that would indebt her to Jane even further, or even what that would mean. She almost wants to try, because she hates the way Jack took her arm and _laughed_ at her fucking name.  

Jane’s silent, lost in thought. Finally, she says, sounding very old and tired, “You’re not here about me. You’re here about you.”

The worst is over. Even if there’s bad news, even if this signals a very different future, Furiosa can’t quite care. If this is the small thing that takes her down - so be it. She can fight it. She can hold it off. She can make it back to the Citadel and make sure that Max is taken care of. If she dies, he won’t stay, but if the girls are there, he might not fade entirely.

Of course he will. She’d do the same if it were him. It’s been too long. His blood runs in her veins and her breath is in his lungs. They’re too intertwined to survive apart.

“Listen to me,” Jane says. “And then tell me if I’ve got it straight: Joe was a bad man, and he did whatever he could to achieve his goals.”

Furiosa’s throat clenches. She of all people is keenly, painfully aware of his tactics.

“I want say I didn’t know him, but the truth is that I didn’t know him well,” Jane goes on. “Maybe no one did. What I do know is that he knew our world was over. All of us did, in the end.” She touches a switch, and the machine flickers off. She gently tugs down Furiosa’s shirt, and tucks the blanket around her shoulders.  “He was the sort of man who thrived in chaos. I’m certain I don’t need to tell you that.” She sits back in the chair, hands tucked between her knees. “I think in the end, when the rest of us were trying to hide, trying to preserve the world we knew...I think he remade himself. He became the man he wanted to be, the man maybe he always was. I know at least he would have tried, and if he tried…”

Furiosa listens.

“I wasn’t a doctor, but I’ve seen a lot,” Jane says quietly. “I think that if he became the man he wanted to be, he would have set himself up as a king. He demanded loyalty from his soldiers, and I think that once the conventions of society were gone-” She meets Furiosa’s eyes. “I don’t know what an Imperator is, but I know what it sounds like. You came in with the sort of mechanical arm that would have been impossible before the wars.” She glances at the prosthesis hanging off the back of the other chair, the one Max had been sitting in. “Before, it would have been different. It would have been made like flesh. It would have been...benign.” That word again. “This is a weapon.”

“Yes.”

“The Joe I knew,” Jane says carefully, “was not...progressive. He wouldn’t...forgive me, I have to be blunt. There were more reported rapes under his command than any other. Outside the conventions of society-”

Furiosa makes herself breathe, makes herself calm and steel and untouchable. The wall over Jane’s shoulder is covered in the same flaking paint, the same creeping dry mold as the rest of the room.

“I think he would have made himself a kingdom,” Jane says. “I think he would have made himself an army, and...the world was already dying before the war. You said there was someone in...Bartertown, was it? Someone who sold medicines?”

She makes herself respond. “Yes.”

“We weren’t having enough babies, even then. Even trying everything, we couldn’t-” her voice shakes. “I wasn’t a doctor, but I saw enough. At the end, so many people were trying, trying whatever they...I think after the world fell, all of that was even worse, and I think Joe was prepared. He would have made himself an army, but so many people died, and armies have come from somewhere. For all his faults, he was incredibly smart; he would have known that.”

“He did.” Jane’s words are sinking in like the anesthetic, heavy and cold and numb.

“You’re a woman, and I remember Joe. I think you weren’t always an Imperator.”

Her heart is suddenly racing again, the phantom hands squeezing her throat, her wrists in shackles, the bulk of him pressing down, always pressing, pressing-

“I think he tried everything,” Jane says. “I think whoever was at Bartertown was supplying him.”

She’s still breathing. She’s breathing. She’s thinking of Max, of the place where his neck meets his shoulder, the scent of his skin and the salt of his sweat-

“It’s not hard to make some of the medications, not if you know what you’re doing. I treated a lot of women then, at the end. There are side effects to fertility treatments, especially ones done poorly and aggressively, medications dosed too high, and used in ways they shouldn’t have, and I...I started to learn them too well.” Her voice shakes a little. “You didn’t want this, did you?”

“No.” It’s the first time Furiosa has actually said it, the first time she’s said it out loud to anyone, to _herself_. “I didn’t want it.” It feels like cracking rock, the sudden, wrenching movement of a part rusted in place. “I didn’t want any of it.”

“Your scars say there hasn’t always been someone well-trained in sewing you up.”

“No.” She thinks of Mari, of Cheedo, of their steady gentle hands.

“I don’t think your cyst is malignant,” Jane says. “I don’t think it’s cancer. I think it would feel different for you. It would bleed. It would affect your intestines. This one’s large enough that it would hurt so much you couldn’t move.”

She thinks of Mari.

“This cyst, it’s making the same hormones your body would if you were pregnant, and you said you never were. You said they made sure.”

Her throat is closed, she’s breathing, she has to keep breathing-

“You’re strong.” Jane pauses, a muscle working at her temple. “You’re just old enough that they might have had resources left over from before. I think they tried everything they could, and you were one of the ones they tried it on. I think it didn’t work. I think he kept you for your strength, and I think you killed him for it.”

It’s everything she’s never said. It’s the pieces meted out, first to the girls, then to Max, then to her mothers, never the same pieces to the same people. Somehow, in this dank and dusty room in a dying building, this angry old woman she doesn’t know has looked inside her body, and laid everything out like a map.

Furiosa feels strangely calm, strangely light. “How do you know?”

“I knew him once.” Jane stares at her hands, and when she looks back up, her eyes are fierce and bright. “It’s what I would have done, if they’d done it to me. It’s what I’d do right now, right this second, if I had an arm like yours and the strength to use it.” She sits back up abruptly, collecting herself. “I don’t have the ability to check anymore. My equipment is useless, and I don’t have the resources to make anything as sanitary as I’d need it to be. I can’t do anything for you except tell you what I think is going on inside you.”

This is suddenly two women, one who takes lives and one who saves them. Furiosa is very, very cold.

“I think they gave you too much,” Jane says. “I think they dosed you too high for too long, and burned you out. I think you’ve had cysts for years, but life is hard and the scars on your body say you’ve been injured many times. Maybe you’ve gotten lucky: maybe they’ve been small or quiet or fast, and they haven’t hurt you as much as they could have.  Maybe they’ve happened when you were healing from something else, and you didn’t notice the pain. None of them twisted, none of them fell and rotted inside of you.” She pauses. “I think this one happened in just the right place, stimulated just the right hormones. I think if I had the resources to a blood test, it would have told me you were pregnant, because it’s making your body lie.”

Her body is lying to her, and she’s been lying to Max, a chain of lies that just keeps building. “Now what?” She needs to know. Is she still on a timeline of a different sort? Will she need to find a way like Mari, to fall asleep before the worst and go peaceful and loved?

“If they’ve gone away before, I think this one will go away too.” Jane shakes her head. “I hope it does. I have no way of knowing. I’m sorry. But I think - I _think_ that since you’re not in any pain, and you’re not bleeding, and you haven’t bled in a long time...I don’t think you’re going to die.” Her lips quirk. “At least, not from this.”

Furiosa snorts.  

Jane leans over. “You came here looking for something. I’m sorry I couldn’t give it to you.”

“You gave me an answer.” It feels like the most important answer she’s ever gotten, and she’s lightheaded, at the peak of a jump right before the fall.

“Give it a few weeks,” Jane says. “It should go away on its own. Will you let me show you?”

She swallows hard, the Mechanic’s hands-

No. She needs to know. “Yes.”

“Lie back, if you will.” The blanket comes back down, and Jane presses gently at a spot just above Furiosa’s hip. “Here,” she says. “When your fingers come back, touch here, just a bit. It’s - just barely, right there, almost too deep. If you feel the opposite side, there’s nothing. If it shrinks, you won’t find it. If it doesn’t - that’s a surgery I can’t perform, but…” she covers Furiosa back up. “There’s a scar on your ribcage. I saw many of those. You had a pneumothorax once, didn’t you.”

Furiosaa doesn’t know that word, but she _know_. “He stabbed me,” she says, the memory blurry and choking. She’d been drowning in herself, but she’d been at peace, knowing that Joe was dead and the girls were safe- “Max, he…” What was it the girls said? “He stabbed me to make me breathe.”

“And you didn’t die. You should have gone septic-” she shakes her head in wonder. “Someone out there. They know more than I do. They’re surviving, and because of them, _you_ are.”

There is so much Vuvalini in her, in her hands, in her face. “Come with us,” Furiosa says, but like the trade, like the bullets and the guzzoline, she already knows the answer.

“No.” It’s firm, and more than a little sad. “I wouldn’t be of any help. The things I know - they barely helped you. I ran a few sutures. That’s nothing, less than nothing. Your man saved you. I saw how he looked at the needle. He would have done it himself if I hadn’t.” She reaches over and pats Furiosa’s human hand, the one that’s starting to prickle back to life. “You gave Jack those bullets, and if there’s any justice in this world, one will go through his forehead.” She glances at the door, almost conspiratorially. “I’ve been saving one of my own. The reactor’s on it’s way out - weeks, if not days. It won’t kill us, not the way it’s made, but we’ll suffocate just the same.” She takes a breath. “Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take a walk. I’ve been in here for twenty years, afraid of everything, but this place is gone. It’s dying. It’s been dying for longer than anyone wants to admit, and we’ve been dying along with it. The boys don’t understand, but we missed our chance to change.” She smiles to herself. “I’m going to take a walk. I’m going to feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my face, and it will be my own fucking choice. I won’t be running, not from those damn boys, not from the end of the world, not from anything.”

There’s a long moment of silence. Jane looks almost beatific, her eyes closed and face relaxed. Furiosa aches, boneless and floating. She thinks of Mari, of the quiet peace of her passing.

“Well then,” says Jane brusquely, brushing off her shirt. “Your man’s outside, shitting himself with worry. Do you think you can walk?”

She can’t, not really; her legs are wobbly and the dizziness clings to her vision. Jane puts herself under Furiosa’s stump, her thin, narrow body shouldering more of Furiosa’s weight than she’d have guessed possible, but despite that, they manage.

Max is slumped against the wall opposite to the door, a miserable bundle of exhausted nerves, white-faced with red-rimmed eyes. He rockets to hs feet as soon as she staggers out, and mothers, she has never needed to touch him more than she does at this moment.

“She’ll make a full recovery,” Jane declares, but he’s buried his face in Furiosa’s good shoulder, his whole body heaving.

“Five minutes,” he croaks. “You _said_ -”

“We should leave,” she says into his hair. “We need to go.”

He doesn’t need a second invitation.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

 

The walk is frankly more than she’s capable of, but somehow, they make it. There are vague moments of the men blustering about the raiders, how it was protection that hadn’t been needed, but Max silences them with a fierce, feral growl. At the door, she feels Jane come up and put her hands on Furiosa’s cheeks. “It’ll pass,” she murmurs. “Don’t come back.”

She sounds so much like Mari at that second, Furiosa’s eyes burn, and Jane’s hands withdraw, damp. She wants to tell Jane to come with them, to make her change her mind, but her mouth isn’t connected to her body, the memory of breathing faint in her lungs.

Max bundles her into the car and fangs it. It’s such a relief - it’s such a _relief_ \- to be back in the passenger seat, to feel the engine’s heat against the firewall and smell the exhaust that funnels in when he shifts just right.

She doesn’t have to worry. She isn’t killing them both. It’s still impossible, it’s _still_ impossible. She was wrong, and she has never, never been so utterly grateful.

She doesn’t know how long they drive. She drifts in a comfortable haze. Her shoulder aches, and every bump is a bright, sharp pain, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. There isn’t a knot in her chest, there isn’t a bomb in her body waiting to blow them apart. At one point, she rolls her head over to stare fondly at him, and the expression on his face so fierce, so blistering that she feels it like a shockwave straight into her bones.

They stop when it gets dark. “Guz?” she asks, because she knows he was pushing his redline, but he shakes his head.

He’s still breathing hard like he’s the one that’s run for hours, instead of the car. She’s feeling less woozy, much more sore, but he still helps her out like she’s the most fragile thing in the world. It hurts to lay down, so she props herself up against the chunk of decimated coolibah he’s chosen to shelter them. He stalks around, obsessively checking the car, cataloguing the supplies, anything but coming to her, anything but looking at her. “Max,” she says.

He stops abruptly, and she can see him trying to stay in control, given away by the way his hands are white-knuckled on the edge of the hood. He’s breathing in great, shuddery gulps.

He’s teetering on the precipice of a complete breakdown, and it’s all her fault, but like a boil, she has to lance it, and it’s going to hurt them both. “I had to,” she says quietly.

“You _said_ ,” he manages, “ _five minutes_.”

“I needed it.”

“It was _two hours_ -” his hands go up, making hard fists in his hair, and he’s rocking, pacing, trying to bleed off the terrible energy trapped inside. “I _thought_ -”

She’d known this was coming. She’d known all along, and dreaded it, and _done it anyway_ , and the price is the way he’s spinning apart like a blown wheel.

“I _told_ you-” and then he slams down the hood of the car, a bone-shattering crash that paralyzes her lungs. He doesn’t mean it, he would never- not to his _car-_ but what she’s done is _worse_. “And you _said_ -”

“You couldn’t be there,” she chokes. “I needed her to- I didn’t want you there if-”

“If _what_ -” and he’s so far past the point of tears that he’s just turning red, he’s shaking hard and bleeding-

“I needed her to check,” she blurts out. “If it was- if I was actually-”

He’s hanging in space like he’s at the apex of a jump, the moment before gravity brings him down to crush. He isn’t even breathing, he’s just staring, his face a gaping emptiness waiting for an emotion to fill it.

She feels like a blocked supercharger, starving, dying. “I thought- I thought I might be-” and she _still_ can’t say the word, she’s still such a fucking coward even though she _owes_ him this, owes him this and so much more- “and I asked her to _check_ because she’s the only one who _could_ , but it wasn’t, I’m not, it’s impossible, it’s still impossible-”

When he speaks, it’s small and strangled, only a fraction of the air he needs squeezing through his throat. “You thought-”

“I didn’t know-”

“You _thought_ -” and then his hands are clawing at his forehead, coming down to go hard and fisted at his sides. He’s spinning in place, and when he finally looks at her, he’s drowning in a scream that’s too huge to come out.

She sits motionless, unable to move and unable to die.

“ _Why_ ,” he finally gasps out, and he’s nothing but a huge beam of shearing, tearing metal, “can’t you just fucking _trust_ me?”

She doesn’t know how to say it. She doesn’t know how she can even begin to explain the days and days of panic, of desperately turning it over and over and over in her head searching for a way that wouldn’t hurt him. “I didn’t know if it was real,” she ends up saying, but it’s a poor fucking excuse and they both know it, and he blazes right through.

“If you were,” he growls, “if you  _were_ , would you tell me then?”

Her eyes are hot and flooding. She isn’t an Imperator, she isn’t even alive, she’s a single raw nerve agonized and overexposed-

“Would you have just-” and he isn’t human now either, he’s disintegrating in front of her, the shrapnel of an explosion- “ _When_ would you have-”

“I don’t know,” she wails, and she hates herself for that voice, hates herself for how shattered she sounds. She’s been floating in relief, and he’s been dying in front of her, and she’s kept him out, and he’s _known_ , he’s fucking known-

“You would have just...waited.” He sucks in a breath that doesn’t work. “Just...let me worry?”

“I was afraid,” she snaps. “I was so afraid-”

“ _I was afraid,_ ” he roars. “You wouldn’t _say_ , and I _knew-”_

“You _knew_?”

He is suddenly too quiet and too bright and too still, and she is suddenly very, very scared. “You thought,” he grinds out, “that I _didn’t_?”

This is worse than the argument after the Glow. This is worse than any fight she’s ever had, any person she’s ever killed, every brutal and cruel act she’s ever committed in Joe’s name. The worst part, the incontrovertible, undeniable, _absolute_ worst part, is that she’s committed this sin in her own name, by her own hand, by her own choice, _knowingly_ , and she’s done it to the only person with the capacity to forgive her.

“What did you think?” she whispers, the reality of what she’s done stuck tight in her throat.

“You were in that _room_ ,” he croaks. “You were _there_ , lying there, and _you_ -”

She’d told him to leave, and she hadn’t come back out.

Mothers. She’d been so groggy, so scared and so preoccupied-

“Max-”

“You thought-” and he’s choking, the words strangling him, strangling them both, “you thought it would be _worse-_ ”

“Your son,” she manages, “I couldn’t-”

“You _said_ ,” he grinds out, “that time...you _said-”_

They'd had this talk. She knows what she'd said, that maybe if it was possible, it would only ever be possible with him, and he'd _agreed_ , but it hadn't been possible, so that was a road she'd been sure they'd never have to drive. “I didn’t think-”

“Don’t ever,” he says, quiet and deadly, “make _my_ decisions.”

It hangs between them like poison gas.

“I didn’t think it could happen!” she finally bursts out. “I thought I was losing my mind-”

“You thought,” he says bitterly, and shakes his head. He throws her half of the bedroll down at her feet, crawling to the top of the car to glower at the desert. “You should sleep.”


	11. Chapter 11

They don’t speak for days.

It’s miserable. It’s the worst it’s ever been, and on top of everything, her shoulder is a hard knot of pain and she still can’t keep anything down.

They drive. There’s no direction. He hunches over the steering wheel, bound so tightly inside himself that even an accidental touch sends him exploding away from her.

She was wrong. She’d had no idea, and the worst part is that he’d _said_ once, half a sentence barely choked out, but she’d been so sure of herself she’d dismissed it.

He’s never said anything unless it was important. He’s never said anything that he couldn’t otherwise express, and he’d _said_ it-

She doesn’t know how she can make amends, or if she should even try.

Her wound heals, the skin drawing against itself. Jane hadn’t had any confidence in herself, but her stitches were neat and tight, and the sutures fall out just as predicted. It’s sore, but functional, and every time she clenches her human fist, she feels a hard shudder of relief.

She doesn’t know when it ends, but she knows exactly when she realizes it. They’re sitting on their bedrolls on the top of a sandy butte at sunset, the desert below them shimmering with remembered heat. They’re each eating a bag of rations from the derelict, a car’s length apart as they’ve come to be, two sides of the aching, silent chasm that she’s almost given up trying to cross.

She’s slathering an unidentifiable paste on a hard chunk of something when it hits her: she’s starving. Well and truly starving. She suddenly thinks of the last time she’s been sick, and it’s been days. More than days.

She has the presence of mind to set her food back on its package rather than dropping it in shock, but then she’s on her feet, tugging at her girdle until it falls away and hiking up her shirt. With shaking human fingers, she presses into the spot above her hip, the place where Jane had said it was, first gently and then firmly, deeper.

He’s standing too, white-faced, whatever he’s eating forgotten in his hand. It’s the first time he’s actually _looked_ at her in far too many days. He makes a small, strangled noise.

She’s breathing hard. “I think- I think it’s _gone_.”

He blinks. “You,” he manages.

“It’s gone,” she says. “Gone-”

He looks like he might actually cry, and she can see too many days of silence and pain all stuck in his throat and wildly clambering to get out.  

“I think I’m okay,” she says, and it’s the most she can say, the most she dares when he’s staring at her like that.

They sit back down, because his legs seem to have given out beneath him, and hers aren’t steady either. She’s weightless, the food sticking in her throat. She might be shaking. She can’t bring herself to say anything. When she’s done eating, she presses her fingers into her stomach, searching for the nothing that’s finally, truly, achingly there.

The sun sinks below the horizon, and they’re back to the heavy silence.

The first handful of stars are slowly coming out at the other end of the sky when he finally says, “What was it?”

She doesn’t understand, and glances over. He’s got his elbows propped on upraised knees, looking as tired and worn as she’s ever seen.

“If it wasn’t-” he swallows hard. “You said it wasn’t. So...what?”

“She called it a cyst.”

He nods, half to himself, and then slowly turns his head, his eyes still on a point that’s not her. “So...it goes?”

He doesn’t know. This last bitter stretch of days, and he hadn’t _asked_ , and she hasn’t _told_ him. She’d told him what it wasn’t, not what it was, and he’s been too angry-

No. She feels the earth drop away. He’s been too _scared._

“Max,” and she’s suddenly desperate to go to him, to tuck him against her and make him breathe.

“It’s gone,” he says again bleakly, and then he _is_ looking at her, and she feels herself shatter.

“I thought you-” but she can’t say she thought he knew. How would he have known?

All these days, all the endless driving, the way he can’t make himself touch her, can’t make himself even _see_ her-

She can't ask, but she has to ask, and it comes out too small for the cavern of her lungs: “What did…?”

His eyelids flicker, and he makes a vague motion with one hand. “The Waste,” he mutters, “...it eats, twists…”

Jane’s word comes back to her: _malignant_.

All the breath rushes from her lungs. “No,” she chokes out. “She said it was probably fine, it would go away-”

“How,” he says quietly, “would she know.”

“She looked at it.”

“She was sure?”

This is why he can't look at her. This is why they've been driving aimlessly for days. He's thought he was losing her, and he'd been unable to leave her on her own, unable to tear himself away.

She thinks of Mari. She'd have had no resources to do it herself, nothing to help her let go in a quiet sleep. She would have gone like a War Boy, riddled with tumors and in too much pain to even cry, and he would have watched, unflinching until the moment she was gone, and then he would have died too.

Two deaths is more than any man can withstand, and he’s withstood more than most.  

“She said it would go away,” she repeats. “She said I’d probably had them before. She said if it didn’t, I’d know.”

He puts his head down between his knees. She’s not sure if he’s dizzy or angry, and it’s not until she sees his shoulders heave that she realizes he’s _crying_.

There’s still so much distance between them.

“It’s gone,” she tries. “I’m better.”

“You,” he says hoarsely. “Didn’t let me _know_.”

Her chest is too tight to speak.

“You,” he continues, in a voice like crushing stone, “wouldn’t say. Let me think you were... d’you even _understand_?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you.” He's building up to an anger she deserves, but she still can't stop herself from flinching as she sees it rise and swell. 

“I _knew_ ,” he bursts out. “Before, you wouldn’t say, but I thought...thought the same as you, but you went _in there_ , and then said you _weren’t_ -”

She is nothing. She is vapor, she is guzzoline after the burn.

“What could I think?” he asks. “If it wasn’t- if you weren’t...what else is there?”

There are no other ways she could have failed him as spectacularly as she has.

He shakes his head, and when he looks at her, there are wet trails slicing through the dust on his face. “What’s true _right now_?”

“There isn’t anything,” she says, everything going hot and blurred. “There wasn’t before, just...” she makes herself say it, “a lie. I didn’t know it was a lie, and then I lied to you.”

“Why d’you do that?”

“You said you couldn’t,” she whispers. She remembers his face, remembers the way he’d torn himself apart in front of her over something that didn’t exist. “I couldn’t make you do that again.”

He coughs. “I didn’t-”

“I _know_ \- it’s why I couldn’t-”

“No-” and then he’s choking, ducking his head into the fortress of his arms, steeling himself before the words come out, “...didn’t know how much I _wanted_ -”

Her entire body goes numb.

“And you _know_ ,” he says, and it’s the most serious, crushing tone he’s ever used, and it punches the air from her lungs.

She does. She’s known all along, and she’s told herself it was about pain, but it isn’t. It’s about _love_ . He’d have wanted it, and he’d have _loved_ it. It would have consumed him, consumed them both like they’ve consumed each other, and that’s a path she’s never let herself look down. She’s thought that bridge was gone, that road swallowed by the waste. She’d told herself it was. The time he’d thought it had happened before was the first time it had occurred to her to even _consider_ it, and she’d immediately come to the conclusion that it would destroy her, that there was too much blood on her hands to do anything that good in this world. It’s not something she would ever have allowed of herself, and _he_ would dragged her into it. He would have been the better of them, and he would have taught her how. He would have made her learn how to be better herself.

They’re silent a long time, damp and so very alone despite the proximity. Finally, he asks, “If it’s not gone-”

“It is.”

“‘f it didn’t?”

“Cheedo could have taken it out.”

Something snaps inside of him. “We’re going back.”

“We don’t have to.”

“Going _back_.”

There’s no use arguing, and she knows he’s right. The people with the satellites might not even be alive anymore, and if they are, Jane was certain they weren’t the makers of the medication. There’s no way of knowing where the medication-makers might be, if they even still exist at all. Jane’s bunker is almost dead; even she couldn’t tell how many others might have hung on this long, and how many more have already been swallowed up by the waste. Furiosa is alive, and she’s okay, but they’re both scared enough that they desperately need to go home.

“Hey,” he says, and she makes herself turn her head. “I need you,” he says quietly. “Need you to not…”

“I thought I was protecting you,” she admits.

“Cover me,” he says. “Drive. Watch. That’s how.”

Don’t hide things. Don’t lie.

She can’t say she’s sorry. Sorry doesn’t even begin to cover the depth of her shame.

He’s looking at her with an expression half-shadowed in the twilight. He can’t say what he wants, can’t make himself admit what he’s aching for, but it’s written in the naked pain in his face.

She gets up and crosses the distance between them. He moves slightly to make space on his blanket, and fuck, the warmth of him against her side has been a heart-wrenching absence.

“Sprog,” he says quietly. “Jessie.”

These are the names of his beloved dead.

“Killed two of theirs,” he goes on, his voice oddly calm. “But then, mmm. Ran down mine...”

His woman, in a room like Jane’s. She’d gone into that room, but she hadn’t made it out.

“Lost her arm,” he says, and _fuck_ , she hadn’t known- “but she…”

She’d survived long enough to die in that room, and he’d left. Furiosa doesn’t know how she knows, but she does.

He’d given her his blood and then left her on the lift as it rose. He’d turned his bike when the Buzzard car almost crushed her. He couldn’t stand to see that again, and yet he’s watched it almost happen to her over and over and over.

She’s not sure what that means about either of them.

“Your son,” she hears herself say. “How old was he?”

“Eighteen months.” He doesn't even flinch. He’s too far inside himself to flinch. “Two weeks. Three days.”

She rests her head on his shoulder. “Jane knew,” she admits. “She knew what Joe...what he did. She knew what he tried to do. She could see it inside of me.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“They shot her in front of me,” she says, and it comes from the same place his does, somewhere deep and blank and raw. “My mother. Stole both of us, and then just _shot_ her.”

“On the third day,” he says. The first contact with the Vuvalini. He remembers.

“I was supposed to be Angharad.” It’s strange, saying it out loud, with no one but Max and the sand to hear her. “And when I wasn’t, when I _couldn’t_...then he used me for other things.”

She doesn’t have to say she’s committed atrocities in Joe’s name, or that she’s done them willingly and with extreme prejudice. He already knows. What she hasn’t said or he hasn’t heard, he’s learned from the hundreds of days he's spent breathing her breath.

She isn’t a good person. She wasn’t a good person when she was a vehicle, and she isn’t really a good person now that she isn’t.  

The light slides away from the desert. The butte is the last to fade into darkness, its shadow growing long and deep across the waste.

“If it hasn’t happened by now,” she says quietly, “it’s not going to.”

“I know.”

They are two road warriors, two fighters bludgeoned for so long they barely see themselves as people. This is what life’s offered them, broken bodies and broken souls, and they’ve stopped fighting long enough to be caught in the lurch. They have guns and their wits. They have a car and they somehow manage to scavenge enough supplies to keep going. There are oases and towns, Green Places and Citadels, Next Exits and dying bunkers, and they’ll find them, because that’s what they do. They’ll skirt the edges of civilization, comets at the edge of the sun, and if they get any closer, they’ll burn themselves to pieces.

They are never going to have more than this, no matter what they might tell themselves. They have no other options.

She hadn’t known that until now. She’d known that about him, about the pieces of himself he’s cobbled together and wrapped around her, but she keeps realizing and realizing that his blood runs in her veins for a reason.

“'S'not gonna hurt,” he murmurs, “if I touch you?”

It’s going to hurt more if he doesn’t.

She kisses him. His mouth is warm and familiar, and she lets him lay her back. “Tell me,” he insists, glancing at her shoulder.

“Please,” she says, and then he’s there, covering her, holding her, cradling her head in his hands.

They undress slowly. She’s not wearing her prosthesis, and she supports the hard weight of his body as he removes his brace. There’s no one coming, no raiders in the distance, no towns or bunkers. There’s only boots and laces, leathers and hips, the rough fabric of his shirt as she tugs it over his head.

He mouths his way across her uninjured shoulder, sucking a gentle line across her collarbone and down her chest. His tongue is hot on the tips of her breasts, and he teases until her nipples are taut and aching. He continues his descent, stopping at the bottom of her breastbone. “You thought,” he breathes, and there’s both heat and sadness in his voice, “I wouldn’t want-” and then he’s licking his way down her belly, his hands against her ribs and following the trail of his mouth. “As if you could hide-”

He’s kissing across the line between her hips, she realizes, tonguing across the part of her that would have grown heavy and full. “You,” he whispers, like he’s saying a prayer, and when he looks up at her, she almost shatters right there. If it had been real, if it had been-

He slips lower, his breath caught in the coarse, dark hairs. It feels like it’s been a thousand days, and she’s flooding, aching for the touch of his mouth. She arches back, and then he’s there, one thumb teasing the base of her lips while his tongue slowly circles above.  

Just as she’s revving toward the apex, he sucks hard, and that’s the overload, the boiler blown, hot and screaming. She shudders as her body tugs his fingers inside, as he accepts and lets her draw him deeper.

She’s barely done when she’s lurching upwards, pushing him back, her mouth watering as he surges up into her hand, thick and ready and free.

He pulls her into his lap, and she slides over him easily, her stump around his neck and her thighs around his own. She’s already halfway there again, and the nudge of him makes her rise against his body, aching to feel the friction of his hips.  

It wasn’t possible before, and it’s still not possible now, but somehow, there’s been a change. There’d been a tension she hadn’t known she was carrying, and now that it’s gone, she feels loose and unhindered. She feels her body opening up to him, gathering him in with greedy slick as he swells inside.

“Fool,” she whispers, and then tugs his earlobe with her teeth, not enough to break skin but just enough pressure to make his body hitch upward, and there - there he is, right where she wants him, right where he needs to be. He palms her breasts, thumbs stroking hard circles against her skin, and she rocks against him, long practice dropping her into the perfect rhythm. His hands slip lower until he’s cupping her ass, and then he’s pulling her against him with each thrust, hot and hard and confident.

It’s over too quickly. It’s been too long, and they’re too desperate for each other, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what it needs to be, the sensation of the car going off a shallow drop, landing with the absolute certainty that the ground exists beneath it.

They cling to each other in the aftermath, arms around each other, heads resting on the other’s shoulder. She’d thought she’d felt relief before, but she hadn’t, not really. This, now - this is what she’d been searching for: Max solid and steady against her body, nothing between them but sweat and skin.

There are satellites overhead, but there aren’t any answers. They’ll go back to the Citadel and tell the girls, but she and Max won’t stay. There’s another hundred and fifty days in the opposite direction, an endless expanse of nothing.

She brings her human hand up and slowly runs her fingers through his hair, the soft, damp cowlicks that never quite seem to lie flat. “It’s a hard run,” he says into the hollow of her neck. “Always is.”

“I know.” She’s bad at this. She’s still so very, very bad at this. “A hundred days back?”

She feels him hum. “Fifty, maybe. Without too much trouble.”

She knows what kind of luck she has, but he has so much luck. Measured against each other, she’s starting to think they might actually make it.


End file.
